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Google's AI Boss Blasts Musk's Scare Tactics on Machine Takeover (bloomberg.com)
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."
Most blowhards who claim to have a crystal ball turn out wrong.
While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense. Hopping the common-sense hurdle could be centuries or millennia away. Stupid humans with war machines are a far more immediate threat.
Table-ized A.I.
Too many people, like Musk, are primarily worried about an AI taking over the world more or less directly. This is a somewhat unlikely possibility that requires major advancements in AI.
What they should actually be worried about is AI-powered hyper-inequality and mass unemployment. This is a near-certain possibility that the technology is already mature enough for. If killbots ever roam the streets because of developments in AI, it'll be human beings ordering them around all on their own, the AI will just be making those people very rich and independent.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This is nothing more than a miss-step on his part. The man is brilliant, but human and therefore prone to bias speculation. Most of Silicon Valley lives in it's own bubble and therefore it's easy to get caught up in these types of ideas.
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.
Expert opinions only carry more weight than the average Joe's opinion when they are speaking on the topics that they are experts in.
Musk and Hawking are not experts in AI, and their opinion is roughly as weighty as any other intelligent layman. Which is to say, not very weighty.
If you want meaningful opinions on physics, then it's hard to do better than Hawkings. If you want meaningful opinions on AI, you should talk to the AI guys.
Look, a polar bear or a shark are not "intelligent" in the sense we think of intelligence
They aren't?? How are you defining "intelligence"?
This, by the way, is the primary reason why discussions about AI are primarily navel-gazing exercises: we haven't even defined what "intelligence" actually is -- and not for a lack of trying.
Musk is a visionary in every sense of the word. The thing about being a visionary is that its a double-edged sword.
Visionaries tend to completely buy into really crazy notions that are usually completely wrong. But, every so often, one of their crazy notions turns out to be right.
It would be great if every sensationalist story about AI or its future on /. contained a link to the openworm project. You see, when we cannot yet understand how 302 neurons work, it takes quite a leap of imagination to think that we'll create AGI any time soon. There's just too much of a leap from AI (more like very specialized algos for certain tasks) to AGI (which is capable of solving the tasks in has never seen before in any form or shape).
Sure we'll adapt. Maybe nobody will die, maybe 100m will die. That's not really clear until we know the details of how we end up adapting. I suspect if we don't carefully plan how to adapt that it will be the later path.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
See demoneytization of YouTube channels of those with the wrong content.
Say what you want about that but showing ads you can do anyway.
But Google and Facebook commands what's said on the Internet together with the governments.
Bring AI to the surveillance of communication and what do you get?
I don't doubt these or AI companies in general would say no to providing that service to the thought-police.
It will happen. To some extent it's already running but it will of course go much further.
Most blowhards who claim to have a crystal ball turn out wrong. While I don't doubt AI may pose a threat to humanity in the distant future, our current AI completely lacks everyday common sense. It's great at pattern matching now that we have fat hardware to throw at matching, but pattern matching alone can't cover for common sense. Hopping the common-sense hurdle could be centuries or millennia away. Stupid humans with war machines are a far more immediate threat.
Meh, we're far away from the Cuban missile crisis, even with NK making a lot of noise. The real threat is that most of the world is making zero progress on democracy and freedom. In 2006 the Democracy Index was at 5.52, in 2016 it's still at 5.52. The "Freedom in the World" index has been pretty much flat since 2000. Authoritarian regimes like China and Russia sit solid as rock, with dissidents and malcontent quickly suppressed and propaganda filling both regular media and social media. The Arab spring has pretty much failed except for Tunisia and Turkey is well on the way back to the dark ages under Erdogan. So far the free nations have mostly stayed free, but I fear the trend will reverse as civil liberties are handed over in the name of protection from terrorism, anti-crime, anti-corruption and so on.
All it takes is one populist or "strong leader" and the right circumstances like McCarthyism and they'll get their clammy hands on power and not let go. That pattern matching will gobble up your Facebook data, private and public and probably figure you out better than yourself. Look at that recent "gaydar" story where the computer can spot it better than humans. And you don't have to be taken by the secret police and thrown in a cell, all it takes is to tilt the board a little. Most people will scramble to appear to be loyal subjects, even if it's just for show. But that's kinda the point, if you think everyone is watched and everyone else is resigned and it is hopeless then it'll fail. Maintaining an authoritarian regime is about snuffing out the fires while they're tiny or even before they start, so the masses never join them. And Big Data is much worse than Orwell could imagine.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're absolutely right. Nearly every automobile manufacturer isn't racing to develop competitive electric vehicles; nor are countries/cities establishing or contemplating near future bans on ICE vehicles. You're absolutely right, no one else is racing to create their own reusable launch vehicles because Musk didn't do anything particularly interesting with the F9 first stage and they don't feel threatened at all by its development. You're absolutely right, no one cares about his hyperloop dreams, nor are there multiple entities racing to build them around the world. And, of course low friction, decoupled, online payment processing was done by a dozen others long before him.
If causing large scale industry disruption wherever he goes makes him nothing more than a self-aggrandizing hack, I'd hate to see what you call a revolutionary.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Somebody is going to produce a superhuman intelligence
My fear is not about a superhuman intelligence, but on humans taking decisions on inputs from an AI they consider superhuman intelligence
It doesn't take a smart AI to do some very dangerous things depending upon what it is hooked into. So yeah, it can pretty much be as dumb as fuck but if it has the launch codes and can send them, well, you know what, the simplest dumbest bug can launch them. So Elon Musk is in reality looking at the trust of AI issues, considering that crappy coders with uniformly crappy warranties, coded them ie AI meant to flush the toilet in the executive officers suit because who at that level could be bothered with the menial task of flushing a toilet in the Pentagon but instead manages to launch a missile.
So you are not just trusting AI but trusting the crappy code in that AI. How crappy is the code in our modern world, just stop and read software warranties for a change, any other product and I mean any other imaginable product with those kind of shit warranty less warranties and no one would buy them. Software is on the whole buggy shite that barely works. How much should you trust an AI built upon that kind of principle.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen