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.

Comments

He is right, partly

[prefec2]

AI can become a problem. Right now not so much by the infamous Skynet scenario and more in conjunction with big data and automation. It will kill jobs which are repetitive. Together with big data it will be used to manipulate the masses in ways past dictatorships where unable to. It can ruin our democracies. The current abilities of mass media including talk radio and the internet have already been augmented. The same applies to advertisements and customer communication. Yes we need regulations. And a lot of them. And it should include that software should not be allowed to be designed to stimulate dopamine responses.

Re:this seems self-serving

[sfcat]

I don't think anyone is beating Microsoft in AI. They are just not exposing their tech on client side. They are keeping it on server side and only letting customers use it on per-client request basis.

You mean just like Google does? That's not how AI works in practice anyway.

The algorithms are mostly the algorithms. Often tweeking them reduces their performance (hell tweeking their hyperparameters often reduces their performance too). Applied AI (solving a specific problem with AI) is usually about feature extraction and then just trying different algorithms until you find one that works well enough or better than the rest. Some algorithms (NN) have a network topology and often people spend large amounts of time/computation trying different graphs. Often this process is about access to large amounts of computing hardware, access (and use of) high performance analysis systems for streaming data to the algorithms and efficient implementations of those algorithms (Random Forest, Gradient Boosted Machines, etc). Most of these things have nothing to do with AI research (inventing new algorithms).

The point is that none of the examples Musk mentioned involve new algorithms (truly effective novel algorithms are quite rare). And the companies that Musk mentions are downright terrible at all the things around an AI system that are mostly about efficient I/O and computation (BigQuery is the worst performing analytics engine ever created). So any fear of those technologies is probably poorly founded. Either Musk doesn't understand this area (likely) or he has some other reason to propose this (also likely). I'm betting on the latter.

It's sad

[JasperNuyens]

Its sad to see the slashdot public, which should be a little bit informed about the issue, blatantly ignoring whats happening here.

It isn't hard to imagine run away AI. Scifi is full of it. But I find it hard to imagine that humans will create an institution to prevent that on a worldwide scale before it's too late. Elon is clearly an optimist.

It's only after Hiroshima that nuclear proliferation became an issue. Only after the Netherlands was massively flooded that they started their Deltaworks. Only after big scandals where things go utterly wrong that we start with regulation and enforcement.

So I would be surprised if we - as a species - get this right and survive this one. We're probably too dumb, as most of the posts in this thread illustrate.

At least Musk tries... Jasper

Arms Export Control Act should be expanded to AI

[thedletterman]

What Elon is looking for here is export controls, and I would agree that we need to classify artificial intelligence as having the capability of becoming a threat to national security. Which means if you are developing AI in the United States and want to send the code to another country, you need the State Department to authorize that you're not putting bad technology in the hands of worse people.

Re:Good news everyone!

[ShanghaiBill]

regulating gene research just moved all such gene research underground (or to other less-regulation heavy nations).

Indeed. My daughter is a biotech major at the Univ of California. She was offered internships for this summer by 5 different companies. Many of her classmates received zero offers. Why the difference? She was told explicitly that it was her ability to speak fluent Mandarin. Most gene research is moving to China. Yet another industry in America has been regulated out of existence.