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Elon Musk: The Danger of AI is Much Greater Than Nuclear Warheads. We Need Regulatory Oversight Of AI Development. (youtube.com)
Elon Musk has been vocal about the need for regulation for AI in the past. At SXSW on Sunday, Musk, 46, elaborated his thoughts. We're very close to seeing cutting edge technologies in AI, Musk said. "It scares the hell out of me," the Tesla and SpaceX showrunner said. He cited the example of AlphaGo and AlphaZero, and the rate of advancements they have shown to illustrate his point. He said: Alpha Zero can read the rules of any game and beat the human. For any game. Nobody expected that rate of improvement. If you ask those same experts who think AI is not progressing at the rate that I'm saying, I think you will find their betting average for things like Go and other AI advancements, is very weak. It's not good.
We will also see this with self driving. Probably by next year, self driving will encompass all forms of driving. By the end of next year, it will be at least 100 percent safer than humans. [...] The rate of improvements is really dramatic and we have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is symbiotic with humanity. I think that's the single biggest existential crisis we face, and the most pressing one. I'm not generally an advocate of regulation -- I'm actually usually on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case, where you have a very serious danger to the public. There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight to ensure that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. The danger of AI is much greater than danger of nuclear warheads. By a lot.
We will also see this with self driving. Probably by next year, self driving will encompass all forms of driving. By the end of next year, it will be at least 100 percent safer than humans. [...] The rate of improvements is really dramatic and we have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is symbiotic with humanity. I think that's the single biggest existential crisis we face, and the most pressing one. I'm not generally an advocate of regulation -- I'm actually usually on the side of minimizing those things. But this is a case, where you have a very serious danger to the public. There needs to be a public body that has insight and oversight to ensure that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. The danger of AI is much greater than danger of nuclear warheads. By a lot.
Only after the Netherlands was massively flooded that they started their Deltaworks.
That's not true: by 1953, the time of the last great flood, the Netherlands had already been controlling water for centuries. Haarlemmermeer, a lake that caused regular flooding in various cities around it (most notably Haarlem and Leiden) was drained around 1850. The North Sea Canal (which was created not by digging, but by constructing dykes in a swamp) was built around 1870. The Afsluitdijk, arguably the most important of the country's protections, was constructed around 1930. Zeeland was still badly protected when 1953 came around, but plans to construct better dykes were fairly well advanced by that time. One major problem was that the port of Rotterdam needed to keep its sea access, and something like the Maeslantkering required 20th-century technology before it became possible.
It should also be noted that construction is still ongoing, and will remain so until the country gets swallowed by the sea. Only two years ago the weakest point of the coastal defenses, a puny stone wall in the village of Katwijk, was replaced by a proper dyke. If a storm had swept away that wall, it would have flooded pretty much all of South Holland, an area with 3.6 million people, and containing most of the country's economic activity, as well as the national airport...
Now, guess where I live ;-)