Google's AI Boss Blasts Musk's Scare Tactics on Machine Takeover (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:05AM from the he-said-she-said dept.

Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg: Elon Musk is the most-famous Cassandra of artificial intelligence. The Tesla chief routinely drums up the technology's risks in public and on Twitter, where he recently called the global race to develop AI the "most likely cause" of a third world war. Researchers at Google, Facebook and other AI-focused companies find this irritating. John Giannandrea, the head of search and AI at Alphabet's Google, took one of the clearest shots at Musk on Tuesday -- all while carefully leaving him unnamed. "There's a huge amount of unwarranted hype around AI right now," Giannandrea said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. "This leap into, 'Somebody is going to produce a superhuman intelligence and then there's going to be all these ethical issues' is unwarranted and borderline irresponsible."

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What you don't know can't hurt you? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-09-19 08:33 · Score: 2, Informative

In my experience, it is exactly what you don't know that can hurt you.
Take the Soviet Doomsday Machine for instance. It is a very limited AI that uses seismometers to detect a nuclear attack and retaliate, even if the human operators are all dead. A nice sized asteroid strike or caldera event could potentially set it off. This would trigger a very short and catastrophic World War 3.
The annoyed researchers seem to have a lack of vision.