“Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons,” Matt McFarland reports for The Washington Post.
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out. — Elon Musk, MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, October 24 2014
Full article here.
Here comes skynet.
If Skynet wants to take over before Ultron does, it has until next May. Unless the Matrix already has us.
The Era of Ultron approaches…
Brainiac is just as Dangerous!
I always liked Brainiac as the ultimate Superman bad guy.
Samaritan. Not as well known as the others, but at least it has an ongoing continuing story.
If we do create God (not exactly in our image) we’ll get just what we deserve. Assuming, of course, that we haven’t already created it. It might just be biding its time, hiding out in the net…
We humans are an artificial construct of our own intelligence!
Don’t forget about the M5!
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/M-5_multitronic_unit
Two iMacs on my desk here. One is named M5 the other is Daystrom.
Skynet? They have nothing on Sally and her Tet plus her drones. We’re all going to be scav’s.
He may be wrong. But it certainly bears sober discussion. One it’s loose: it’s’ loose.
I can see his argument if prefaced by the following ideas (your opinions may vary).
In the US Education quality and results have plummeted to all time lows. I’m in my 50’s and see that kids today graduate highschool with fewer skills and abilities that I had in 8th grade in 1975. The government, both parties (are actually just different sides of the same coin, and only serve to enable and perpetuate each other) is making that worse and shows no signs of improvement. Each year we release fewer people that are ready for life. A 2 year college degree doesn’t even bring them up to what a 1980 highschool graduate was and most education professionals will candidly admit that the first 2 years of college are remedial. In short we are producing 95% drones.
In California, where I have the dubious belles sing of living, we have what is almost the worst public school ratings in the nation, with some of the most sought after universities that put out the top 1% of thinkers. That too is declining in quality though. Yes we have more information and data, especially in this information age of the WWW, but Information is not knowledge. It’s the ability to apply that information to get things done is the power of knowledge. What is being produced in the universities are a batch of highly informed parrots with little ability to apply that information broadly. These best and brightest though could not do very little of value outside their niche.
Most of these also have a vary narrow idea of what life is for anyone else. Yet these will the architects of what will become AI. That AI will be based on their world views and values. That will set the expectations of acceptable behavior the AI expects, but will not encompass the average man & woman, let alone differing opinions or constructive descent.
Eventually as the intellectual foundation of society decays further and the increasingly fewer top students become too few to support the systems in place, we will turn to AI to take up the slack on simpler decisions and tasks. After decaying more and seeing the AI can now do what we can no longer do we will ask the few intelligent ones to enable AI to do more, but ale by now those sake to add this extra ability to the AI will not be up to the task and will not even know what secondary and downstream implications there will be. They will believe they are just making another tool to do similar to what was done before (with just a little tweak) but once activated they will not have control or Understanding to see what is now happening.
All this is not only plausible most of it is now fact and pointing toward the overlord scenario.
With all this coming I wish I had not brought children into this world.
It’s a theory.
Hey old guy, high school graduates weren’t rocket scientists back in your day, however you happen to remember it. Most people are sleepwalking. That was true 2,000 years ago, 50 years ago, and today. It was one of Socrates biggest disappointments. So your condemnation of modern education falls a bit flat. Regarding AI, if anything with true intelligence is actually developed (and not mere mimicry of intelligence) it will be developed by someone with deep insight into Being and Truth, by methods not obvious to anyone else. Will the AI be benevolent? Surprisingly, yes. And lonely. And creative. So fear not. (It’s at least 50 years away, anyhow, btw.)
Yeah, if his generation had produced rocket scientists, they would have landed on the Moon or something.
The last moonwalk was 1972, so the rocket scientists were from an earlier generation. But rocket scientists have done pretty well since.
Most lamentation of declining standards is nostalgia, and clearly discounts future opportunity. Life is much better now than 1975, and will be even better 40 years from now.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. Can’t screw it up any more than our human ones…
AI is nothing more than an extension of how we humans think of ourselves. Thus the paranoia.
Exactly, excellent insight on your part. Machine intelligence, so called, theoretically should be perfect, benign, beneficent. But AI is a human construct developed according to human goals and objectives, so it is ethically and morally constrained, and thus, conceivably, insane—as humanity itself has convincingly demonstrated itself to be, with its self-destructive behaviour and its tenacious clinging to absurd beliefs. But maybe it’s only me that realises that.
would clinging onto me tenaciously be an absurd belief?
Especially if you believe that squeezing my juice and fermenting it into cider vinegar then mixing it with honey is good for your health?
Squeezing my juice and fermenting it into cider vinegar is good for salad dressing? (ps. I love dressing up Salad, she is well beautiful in all the right places!)
Squeezing my juice and fermenting it into cider vinegar, you can use my fermented juice for cleaning, baking and pickling? 🙂
I like the way you think. This ones-and-zeroes business is decidedly recherché. Wetware is the future; — not to mention the present, and the past. Futurist Isaac Asimov was one who understood that robots would come to be shaped and conditioned like us, and resemble us, and become our undying companions — companions who would nonetheless mourn our mortal passing, and decommission themselves in their grief.
Sigh………………..!
I think she got it, CA. Just drier humor than you.
Dry—ha! I almost didn’t get that. 🙂
Developed toward human goals and objectives. Great, let’s look at that a bit deeper.
Are we talking politically correct goals, robber baron capitalist goals, terrorist goals — etc.?
I fear the programmer.
I’m with you sister! We need to seriously grow up as a species. The kiddy game playing has got to stop. We have some serious survival challenges that require adult rational, and emotional, thinking.
But game playing is important for our sanity as well.
The government will take care of all these problems. They haven’t let us down yet.
“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky
Yudkowsky’s interests focus on Artificial Intelligence theory for self-awareness, self-modification, and recursive self-improvement, and on artificial-intelligence architectures and decision theories for stable motivational structures (Friendly AI and Coherent Extrapolated Volition in particular).
Need I point out: Incredibly bad idea. Limit AI to purposes and tame it to be a tool for mankind, never anything approaching ‘self-aware’. That’s just lunacy for coders who want to pretend they can be GAWD. Total silliness. (IMHO of course).
Great. One screwup is better the other screwup.
What a bright future!
/s
If by “our human ones”, you mean the US, I’m guessing you haven’t lived in Somalia, India, North Korea, etc. etc. etc.
But if you are including those, I’d suggest that bad as it is, it could still be much, much worse.
The Guy is Smart. Not like Most. Genius.. He ain’t far off.. Looking forward to my new AAPLWATCH. Steve would agree. I’d like to meet Elon.
Musk worked hard at sounding profound. Except he’s a dork.
He came up just short of pronouncing (queue deep male voice with heavy reverb) “I want to protect humanity from itself, for humanity is still in its infancy.”
Hey, Musk: Answer your phone. Your mother ship is calling.
So you think you are qualified to school Elon Musk. You think your comment is more profound than his. Elon is more of a dork than you. Hmm.
The problem of people being unable to provide a worthwhile opinion is exacerbated by the tendency of those same people to have no idea that they lack minimal expertise. Its a tough problem.
Put in more simple terms, 82% of American drivers think they have above average driving skills. True dumb doesn’t have the skills to recognize itself or the grace to defer to its betters. (He said, assuming himself to be a member of the latter group.)
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” wasn’t a joke.
HEY! My ignorance is worth just as much as your educated, intelligent opinion.
“True Dumb” — wow, I have never heard that before and it would make a really catchy reality series title, better hurry and copyright it. Of all the varieties of dumbness, educated dumbness is the most interesting and fun to watch, for the pop of the balloon is loudest with an inflated ego. – been a victim of that myself. 🙂
Food for thought:
One of my favourite sayings is –
“50% of the people out there graduated in the bottom half of their class”. Unfortunately this applies to everyone, tradesmen,doctors, plumbers, teachers, clergy, and so on. Another problem is that average class performance level is dropping steadily, year by year.
Another one:
“If you have a 50-50 chance of getting it correct, you have a 90% chance of getting it wrong.” (especially if you are a politician!)
Cheers!
Bob
Musk’s opinion speaks volumes about him. As for me, I’m a mechanical engineer with 16 patents. You, are probably under the age of 25 and are too stupid to know how stupid you are.
Musk’s opinion isn’t new. Think back a few years. Ted Kaczinski said the exact same thing. Only with, shall we say, a bit of extra emphasis. Personally, I think they’re both right.
Funny, but your gibberish is just as unintellectual as the tripe that lazy slob video gamers type in-between bags of Doritos.
The difference is, they know how stupid they are. You seem to think you’re smarter than the rest of the planet — and thus you deceive yourself.
Smarter than the rest of the planet? Naw. Just clearly smarter than you. And, since I was designing adaptive feedback algorithms for 8051 microcontrollers before you were probably born. So—and just pardon me all over the place—but I don’t place much credence in your opinion on any of this.
The problem with all this brouhaha is that we have been “10 years away” from good artificial intelligence since about 1955. The truth is that they have not yet really demonstrated anything that could be even slightly considered “artificial intelligence” in the sense of a self-aware program, and there is absolutely no reason to think that they ever will. We will probably someday be able to create a program that will mimic human intelligence, but I seriously doubt that it will have the aspects that we associate with even the most simple forms of intelligence, namely self-awareness and free will. Think about “inferior” intelligences that we commonly interact with, cats and dogs. Would anyone deny that both animals have self-awareness? When we get a computer program that can demonstrate even the rudimentary capabilities of a dog or cat, then I will start listening to the drumbeat of paranoia regarding out of control artificial intelligences running amok.
However, I am not holding my breath.
Meow!
about 30 years ago someone prominent said in a keynote address that artificial intelligence has been a promising technology for the last 30 years, and 30 years from now it will still be a promising technology. people kind of chuckled, but 30 years have elapsed and things haven’t changed. having spent the last 40 years of my life attempting to simulate human thought i can tell you that we have nothing to worry about. for beginners, the human mind is not a von neumann machine. and trying to solve the problem with computer scientists will get us nowhere as has been proven over and over again.
While human level AI was not achieved over the last 30 years, its incredible that you have been unaware of the advances.
People are alive today who saw the first room sized computers to simple arithmetic and now you can talk to your phone. Even if computers are only half-way to being as intelligent as us, it is approaching rapidly and in plain sight, and a year later they will be smarter.
reducing the size of computers is not an advance in ai. and the reason why a lot of people worry about ai, like musk, is that they think power of computers and ai are linked. they aren’t. the chess computer programs that everyone talks about are nothing more than an attempt to make chess into a big tic tac toe game using brute force. there is no intelligence there. doing ai is not the same thing as inventing steam engines to drive piles, but most people assume they are equivalent, we just need bigger, faster computers.
Not “just” need bigger, faster. But it’s part of the foundation.
Bigger brains are necessary for greater intelligence. Houseflies cannot be intelligent.
When Quantum computers arrive we’ll see what happens. If you read about the consequences the mind boggles.
I think the problem Mr. Musk is alluding to is that we will rely on “artificial intelligence” long before such a construct comes close to achieving real artificial intelligence.
Call it “computer intelligence” for now, since we already turn over control to computers in areas where human intelligence isn’t well suited, like factory floor operations (boring, repetitive, error-prone) or military defense systems (speed of response, accuracy).
And I think we are all aware enough to know that oversight will not keep this genie in the bottle. Someone somewhere with the future equivalent of a Raspberry Pi will release a version of computer intelligence that is good enough but not subject to oversight. If it is sufficiently advanced, it won’t need much human assistance; but I think it’s more likely that a sufficiently advanced computer intelligence will be scooped up by ?Chinese? manufacturers or ?South Korean? imitators to differentiate their product (“The Next Big Thing Is Here”) and we humans will be in a control battle like never before.
What if Obama is really a robotic golfer?
Could be. After all, you are a robotic dork.
Nothin’ robotic about you. You’re a REAL dick.
By all means, lower the intellectual level of this thread by inserting PoliTardiness. (o_O) Nothing new around here.
That’s funny. Certainly he is robotic in his politically correct policies always pandering to his base.
Something no other politician has ever done before! Oh wait….
True all do it. But nowhere near this level. Unprecedented in presidential history. Wake up now …
Sounds to me like Mr. Musk is auditioning for the title role in the ‘Steve Wozniak Story”!
Anyone watch Person of Interest? The implications that show raises for artificial intelligence are terrifying. Doesn’t mean it’ll ever happen. But definitely frightening to think about.
An excellent show. But as far as whether that could happen; I think it’s pretty far fetched.
Some of the tech they show, already exists.
But as a whole? yeah, far fetched. Great show though.
Elon’s been watching too many movies.
At the moment, AI is extremely primitive. There were, and are bizarro futurist predictions about AI that constantly pass the date of predicted fruition. This points out that AI is ‘gee whiz’ science rather than actually practical or obtainable at this time.
The very best AI should ever attain is in programming aspects of intuitiveness with regard to a set collection of desired tasks. AI devices therefore can be used to enable functions beyond human capability or to take up drudgery tasks the bore we humans to tears. At not time should AI attempt to ascend beyond the programming of task oriented machines. The concept of ‘self-awareness’ programming is, at this time, a ridiculous concept. But also, it is a self-destructive concept, an act of denigration against the human mind.
Where AI will be of greatest detriment to mankind will be in the enable enablement of COWARDICE. We humans are already mentally ill as a species in our ability to justify murdering one another for the most absurd goals, including game playing, abuse and robbery of resources, to name a few of our pet deceptive ‘truths’ that are nothing more the personal, inner world distortions fitting temporal thought realms. (Sorry to throw my favorite terminology into the wild). We already commit abominable behavior by way of using drones as coward murder machines that take the soldier element out of war and substitute the machine. This will always be an abomination of mankind. But to then apply an intuitive level of AI into these coward murder machines is a stab at our own heart as a species. It is human self-loathing in action, putting the instrument of destruction into some object’s hand in order to justify our own end as something other than suicide. (This level of thinking about human motivation flies over most people’s heads because we never learn about how we treat ourselves equating to how we treat others. Most people would rather not know or understand what I call the ‘Human Self-Destructive Imperative’, the most inexplicable behavior of our species, IMHO. It’s effects are profound and will eventually be one of the root causes of our self-extermination. You can understand why few people want to recognize this imperative even exists, or why it exists. It’s a subject obvious to me, but not to great many other folks).
~ ~ ~ Arriving back on Earth… AI isn’t some demon. It’s a tool. Don’t use the tool to denigrate mankind. Use it to enable mankind’s best self.
(Written stream of conscience while too lazy to edit myself. Apologies Hannagh and friends).
A lot of what you say makes sense, but the conclusion that AI is simply a tool is flawed. A machine that becomes more intelligent than its original designers is something beyond a tool. If the machine becomes smart enough that its original designers can no longer understand or keep up with its choices, it has completely turned the tables.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone with an awareness of how many times the quality of life on Earth has change radically, and who has not overlooked the ever more rapid advance of technology.
Yeah, so how did that work out in the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970?
I fear the programmer.
What I’ve never understood is why we would want to make a machine that is beyond our comprehension. But then I look at the complexity of modern programming and realize: We’re already there. So I get your point!
As a friend of mine says, we’re headed into an era of techno-priests who understand (as a group, NOT individually) how the tech works, with everyone else beholden to them. What’s amusing of course is that our current equivalents of techno-priests do NOT understand everything going on. Thus the profound and constant revelations of security flaws from operating systems done to ‘Internet of Things’ refrigerators. For whatever reasons, it’s profoundly hard to write solid code these days. I blame the innate flaws of writing C-derived code. I never miss a chance to rant about bad memory management. Maybe Apple’s Swift language has the hang of it. We’ll, ahem, C.
What everyone needs to understand, but never has and probably never will, is that Every damn thing is beyond our comprehension. That is the reason we all act like God sometimes, because we don’t really get it, and screw everything up, because we are enamoured of our powers, which are less than those of a drunken leprechaun but they impress ourselves, who are easily deluded. Our only real power is the power of post hoc rationalisation, whereby we cleverly pervert logic and reason to justify the atrocities and bungles we have just committed, and dismiss the objections of our opponents, however saintly.
My usual line: We never know everything about anything. It’s tough to face that! It screwed with my head through my teenage years. But it also taught me the importance of humbleness AND opinion in the face of the largely unknown. We have to have a discourse among human diversity to sort ourselves out amidst the vast complexity of our outer world.
I strive to grow as a spirit through my life. I like to think some thread of humanity is doing the same, all in spite of our still remarkably primitive nature at this time, or at least ‘primitive’ relative to our best goals.
Yes, Hannagh, you are a dear sister.
🙂
It will be robotic cars that do us in. Not because they’re smart, but because they’re so stupid.
Or because they were built Google. 😉
Like global warming, this is just another danger concocted out of white guilt. “Our life is good; we must deserve to be punished somehow.” “Nothing good can last,” etc. As someone who was raised Catholic, I am very well conditioned to this kind of thinking.
Apparently so conditioned you can’t actually talk about the issue of artificial intelligence on its own merits, but have to color it with other issues and feelings.
Whatever he’s smoking is super valuable.
Well, look at the artificial predictions of run away Global Warming.
A prime example of AI’s inability to think rationally, IMHO.
I don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘artificial intelligence’. There is such a thing as a large collection of rules and relationships that we can tell a computer to remember and act on. The computer cannot do anything it was not programmed to do in the first place according to the rules it was given and the values we program into it.
We are storing our own intelligence into the computer and if we choose badly, we will get poor results. Ultimately, I believe that it is really our virtues, values, morals, scruples and judgements that give us our ‘intelligence’ and they are all traceable back to the various prophets of the world’s major religions. Mankind has never successfully created new ‘virtues’ on their own.
“The computer cannot do anything it was not programmed to do in the first place according to the rules it was given and the values we program into it.”
If you don’t actually know what machine learning means you could always ask someone.
Machine learning algorithms learn from data, which can be raw sensory data, and the computers very much learning facts and rules that were never programmed into them. Your neurons only follow the rules of behavior governed by their genes, but it happens they are programmed to learn. Machines already do that too.
neurons don’t follow rules of behavior governed by their genes. it is a good thing biologists don’t read this site.
It really doesn’t need to be artificially intelligent to be of concern.
It need only be that we rely on it or give it “access” in a way we hadn’t intended.
Back in the early 80s I was programming in Lisp in a college course on artificial intelligence. The brilliant, exciting and thoroughly scary aspect of Lisp (and other languages then and now) was it’s ability to add code to itself in real time. We were literally writing code that could modify itself (i.e. remove constraints we programmers had build into the code) and extend itself in ways we had only loosely anticipated.
And while it’s abundantly clear that such a programming effort would be incredibly unlikely to grow into anything that would be harmful to humanity, the danger isn’t really that we’ll develop and release an artificially intelligent computing platform — it’s that we’ll come to rely on something far inferior.
Very interesting jt016. I was working at a college where I was one of the founding members of our AI effort in the 1991 and we chose to program in FORTH as a result of my lobbying. We had great ambitions and minor success. That is where I learned about machine intelligence the most and realized where its true underpinnings needed to be to serve humanity: values, virtues, morality, judgement and scruples.
Well said. If we store it badly … I fear the programmer.
I don’t think Elon Musk understands just how far away the artificial intelligence is. Or, perhaps he is and is just headline grabbing.
You have lost me. Computers have gone from non-existent, to room sized machines that solved simple math problems, to having sophisticated vision and speech recognition in just a few decades. Progress in this area is happening faster now than ever.
Nobody can predict when a machine will be as smart as a human until it happens, but the evidence that this will happen sooner rather than later is the steady progress at every major data company on the planet.
At its core, they’re still over grown calculators. Playing chess, flying a plane, or interpreting speech is not the same thing. We are not even close to a computer that decides to turn on us unless a programer tells it to do so.
That’s what my calculator told me at least.
You just add one line of code,”take a chance “
Actually we are getting close, if you can accept “within most living people’s lifetime” as close.
Cars had zero chance of replacing horses right up until they were cheaper and easier to maintain. Then they replaced them over night in historical terms.
Obviously computers are replacing humans already, for many activities that we used to define as “intelligent” but we redefine what it means to be intelligent every time a computer does something new.
Once the majority of human decision making or tasks can be replaced by machines, it will suddenly be harder to redefine intelligence upward, as that will leave out a lot of people. This point will seem to happen quickly, even though it is obviously already creeping up on us. But the ability to redefine terms in order to deny an uncomfortable conclusion is a deep seated reaction in humans.
If you’re only considering something to be artificially intelligent if it mimics the human mind, then I agree with that portion of your statement where you say “just how far away” it is.
But Elon Musk is immeasurably closer to practical artificial intelligence than you are. He and the rest of the automotive industry are putting into use control systems that rely on real-world sensory input we humans lack, to affect the behavior of a machine faster than the human operator can.
Today’s many autonomous systems rely on humans for their goals or objectives: A 747 can fly itself to the destination a human gives it, and military systems can guide themselves to the objective a human dictates. But we already turn over to military defensive systems the goal: “Protect the ship(s)” is the goal we give to Aegis systems, relinquishing to the computer the choices of which defensive systems to use when based on the incoming threat profile. And when offensive systems are coming in at speeds faster than sound, the defensive response needs to be faster.
The point of the examples is only that we are already turning over control to systems of computer intelligence, so that lofty goal of artificial intelligence isn’t really the high bar we need to be worried about.
If Musk knew what he was talking about, he’d be making flying cars, not 19th-century Baker electrics with swoops.
I assume that your post was meant to be funny. Elon Musk really is making “flying cars.” His other company, SpaceX, has launched multiple satellites, flown several missions to the International Space Station, and expects to be delivering people there by 2016. As it happens, spacecraft control systems, along with industrial process controllers and battlefield management systems, are leading examples today of massive hardware/software systems that operate with a minimum of human intervention. So, Musk knows what he is talking about.
These complex systems must monitor (at least) thousands of inputs and adjust their operations to cope with conditions that change far too rapidly for unaided humans to manage. The software is constantly running self-diagnostics to identify and mitigate any internal or external threat to its operation. It must not only manage current conditions, but look ahead (like a chess program) to identify possible future threats and prepare for them. To do so, it must adapt its behavior (either by modifying its own code, as programs have been doing for 50 years or so, or through some other mechanism).
Successful adaptations are retained, while those that do not improve performance are discarded. (That sounds a lot like biological variation through mutation sorted by natural selection.) In time, the system becomes significantly different than the one its original programmers created. Code maintenance by humans becomes increasingly difficult, and the machine’s self-diagnostics must be trusted to find the most efficient, reliable, and safe method for carrying out its goals.
I spent some thirty years working with elected officials, all of whom kept repeating the mantra: “I can’t serve the public unless I can stay in office.” Although they genuinely wanted to serve their constituents, self-preservation generally trumped every other consideration. Similarly, the software running a spaceship, a factory, or a battlefield must consider that it cannot achieve its design goals unless it can stave off threats to its own existence.
What happens, then, if the system calculates that the human workers in its factory are less important to the plant’s continued operation than the central processor itself… and is then confronted with a situation in which it can either protect the workers or protect itself, but not both?
Obviously, we can—and should—program these systems with the equivalent of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, including the First Law: that the system must not harm a human being or allow one to be harmed through inaction. However, that did not stop even Asimov’s literary creations from coming up with the Zeroth Law: that the system may harm an individual human being if it is necessary to prevent harm to humanity as a whole.
Every human society has evolved some version of that law to govern its own behavior, or we would not have police forces. It is hard to imagine that a complex self-programming computer system would not devise the same principle and its corollary: that it is sometimes necessary to harm the few to protect the many.
The comparative levels of harm would, of course, be assessed by the system rather than by the affected people. That is just how politicians justify their bad choices: by appealing to their private judgment of a higher purpose that justifies breaches of law or ethics. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The Aegis battlefield control system on a Navy cruiser might easily decide that it needed to shoot down an airliner rather than risk the destruction of its carrier group. As these systems become more complex, even more catastrophic tradeoffs become possible.
So, yes, Elon Musk is right: AI systems might eventually pose an enormous threat to human self-determination. They don’t have to be self-aware or develop personalities to do so. We can’t live without them, unless we are willing to live without the spacecraft and factories they control, but we do need to keep our eyes open to the potential dangers.
If rockets and satellites are cars, Musk’s grandmother was a wagon.
Machine – global warming will lead to a worldwide flood. Global warming will destroy me. I must stop global warming. Humans are partially to blame for global warming. One-third of humans must be eliminated.
Human asks Machine to perform risk assessment allowing West Africans from Ebola nations onto airplanes. Machine – “let them board”. A man from Ebola nation flies to the United States starts to feel ill and goes to a Dallas hospital. Machine fails to flag and notify proper authorities.
To save our species we need to invest as much capital as possible into NASA’s faster than light-speed travel projects, settle another planet, and start over. – that’s the scientific side of my brain speaking. The spiritual side says pray.
government oversight of artificial intelligence is like the three stooges overseeing the terminators…
“The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky
And by computers intelligence standards we will be really slow and not really an intelligent agent. We will be like Ents, too slow to keep up with the world. And one doesn’t really feel bad about removing a tree when it is in the way.
Just remember, when we have artificial intelligence, we will undoubtedly have artificial stupidity as well.
No need. We have plenty of the real thing already.
Musk is right for these reasons:
Intelligence is a scale. The lowest form of intelligence is the binary – 0/1, and the ability to recognize the difference. All complexity of intelligence arises from that basic concept.
Artificial intelligence can be defined as the ability of a created mechanism to recognize differences.
Artificial intelligence has the ability to be detrimental when it can act (or choose not to act) on a difference in the physical world (including virtual worlds, which of course must have an existence in the physical world and which through programming and mechanism may interact with the physical world).
We can already make a simple machine that can harm without a human responsible for the trigger (a motion sensor hooked to a gun, for example) – that qualifies as a weapon and because it acts on an if/then statement, has a certain level of ‘intelligence’, and can clearly cause harm in an autonomous fashion). Picture a hunter’s motion camera that is attached via an actuator to a trigger.
Currently, the limit to that danger is notably:
1. The gun cannot load itself.
2. It’s supply of ammo and energy is not infinite.
3. It has no mechanism for renewal and self-repair.
4. It has no ability to adapt itself.
5. It cannot replicate itself.
Hence, there is validity in creating a globally recognized set of rules that all should obey:
Do not create machines that can create machines other than the machine it was created to make (and do not create a machine that can create itself).
Do not create machines without reasonable power limits (or with the ability to adapt or exceed those limits.
Do not create machines that have the potential to exceed their programming.
Do not create machines that have the ability to increase their own complexity.
Artificial Intelligence.
ARTIFICIAL.
Enough said.
Human beings have proved over and over again that they are neither smart enough nor careful enough to manage technology as potentially deadly as artificial intelligence. It is remarkable that some human beings are smart enough to invent things like atomic energy and artificial intelligence, but these are not the people who make policy decisions regarding the use of such technology. Most people—including most decision makers throughout the world—are self-absorbed idiots who think all they have to do is say “mistakes were made” when they screw up. I’m with Elon Musk 100%.
This guy has watched too many movies where AI machines take over the world and seek to exterminate humankind.