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Elon Musk Says AI Is the ‘Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization’
- seertaak 9y agoAlthough I don't doubt that there's an element of sincerity in Musk's many pronouncements, all this talk of AI is also great way of signalling that he's at the technological forefront.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoWhat cutting edge AI has got Musk worried?
- partycoder 9y agoI disagree. AI will not be the same as animal intelligence. The driving force behind animal intelligence has been survival. Animal intelligence evolved gradually resulting in a hybrid brain containing primitive structures with primal instincts and irrational behavior as well as more evolved structures capable of strong problem solving. Therefore our intelligence is tainted with primitive behavior. Strong AI can eventually set intelligence free from our primitive, irrational roots and that is in itself not bad.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoIsn't rationality a consensus between specific beings, and doesn't rationality change? What you and I find rational today may not be the case for someone else from a different time and/or environment (it's only in the consensus between you and me are the others irrational). If you agree with this, then you can't take rationality as an absolute.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoUhhh, no. Very much no. There are technical measures for the performance of decision-making processes. If you've got access to the same information as someone else, and they make more accurate predictions than you do, they're almost certainly doing better on the whole "use information to figure out how reality works" project. The only sense in which "rationality" changes is when you're talking about the project to use our squishy meat-based thinky bits better, cultural and environmental baggage and all. In which case, "rational" strategies are going to be much different if you have, say, lots of shame-based baggage due to a strict Catholic upbringing. Also, please stop listening to postmodernists until you've got a thorough nuts-and-bolts understanding of how systems work. It's really not good for you.
- omarchowdhury 9y agoHow is rationality not a consensus between beings? Where is the absolute objective measure for reason?
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoI'll give a more concise definition of what rationality is: a measure of how well beings use information to model, predict, and act upon reality. Having a consensus that you predicted reality well neither changes your prediction nor reality. The reported scores are subjectively determined - you can cheat and bribe the judges - but it doesn't change the underlying objective facts of the situation.
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- solotronics 9y agoWhat I really want to know is if it's possible for an AI to emerge organically on the net and if so how would you even detect it? Could a distributed intelligence be influencing things already without people knowing? It's a fun thought experiment I play with myself while I build datacenters all over the world stuffed with cloud computing hardware. Deus ex machina?
- dlwdlw 9y agoI'm thinking block chains will be the start of that. Distributed non-forgetting memory systems that can influence reality via manipulation of virtual tokens that tie directly or indirectly to tokens in reality.
- atroyn 9y agoIt's unclear that it's even possible to emulate general intelligence by computable functions, let alone that it's possible to improve it to superhuman capacity. There are clear and present threats to civilization needing to be dealt with - superhuman A.I is, to quote Maciej/Pinboard, the 'Idea that eats smart people'.
- maldeh 9y agoMy takeaway is that there's a more pressing risk from humans automating too much too fast with something approximate and suboptimal, but "good enough". There're already plenty of situations where city planners enforce macroscopic policies that result in widespread discrimination and such, and that was with best intents. The promise of AI is that entire horizons of industry open up with opportunities for automation, making us tackle historically difficult-to-get-right objective functions, potentially with bad macroscopic results.
- atroyn 9y agoThis is a whole other set of problems, which I agree will only get worse. However they don't really represent the threat Musk discusses - superhuman / superintelligent paperclip maximizers and other Yudkowskian nonsense.
- emmab 9y ago> It's unclear that it's even possible to emulate general intelligence by computable functions, let alone that it's possible to improve it to superhuman capacity. Rejecting the physical Church-Turing thesis is not really plausible. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/
- atroyn 9y agoThis is the wrong way around. It's possible for a physical system to perform computation. It's not necessarily true that all physical systems can be emulated by computation.
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- esaym 9y ago>Musk outlined a hypothetical situation, for instance, in which an AI could pump up defense industry investments by using hacking and disinformation to trigger a war. What the heck is he talking about? With my limited exposure to AI and neural networks, there really is no algorithm that can make algorithms. And therefore, AI doesn't really "think". Sure you can train a neural net to pick out the "diamonds" in a sea of garbage, but that is still not "thinking", merely going on an educated guess backed by statistics. Or am I missing something?
- gleenn 9y agoA lot of AI apocalists are worried about the "singularity" which is the point at which an AI could program itself and become aware and have a largely negative affect on the world.
- je42 9y agothat's not the biggest issue. if you have an AI that is pretty smart, and you add a lot of money, then you have a pretty big problem as since you can scale it, and let it do what you want. i.e. side stepping democratic approaches. or causing large scale unemployment. Later, you have the selfaware-ness problem, but that's less of a concern in the shorter term.
- je42 9y agoSo that's why he is actually saying it. Think about the rest of the population. They have even less of a clue. Obviously, AI is not right now in a state to be a thread. However, if you extrapolate - we are getting close to the singularity. If you assign any probability greater than zero to that the singularity will happen in your lifetime, it is probably a good thing to start thinking about, how to deal with it.
- Animats 9y agoI'm less worried about "the singularity" than companies where strategy is set by AIs optimizing for shareholder value with no other constraints.
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- elorant 9y agoDoes he know something that we don't? From what I understand his companies have done little to no research on the subject. He might be much better educated than the average geek but that doesn't mean much considering that the whole field is highly experimental. No one can tell with any kind of certainty how an AGI would behave. What am I missing here?
- 101km 9y agoElon Musk is a geek who learned to drop exactitude when communicating to the masses.
- speeq 9y agohttps://openai.com/about/ https://openai.com/about/
- Nuzzerino 9y agoThe AI Doomsaying research has been in full swing for at least two decades. Refer to Nick Bostrom or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the latter of which Peter Thiel supported starting around '06.
- Koromix 9y agoProbably nothing. This is wide-scale bike-shedding[1], basically. The real problems our unsustainable civilization faces (population overshoot, energy and fossil fuel shortage, ecological collapse, unsustainable agriculture, climate change, and so on) are between hard to impossible to solve at this point. They're also actually scary to think about. So instead we talk about the "easy" and trivial stuff first. AI and singularity happen to be a nice kind of scary, because hardly anybody really believes it's a serious threat. It's kind of like watching a scary movie. You get a bit scared, but not too much, because you know there's no real danger. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
- jpalomaki 9y agoHe does not know and we don't know. Elon's point seems to be that we should start to regulate before we hit the point when the risks becomes certain, because then it will be too late. Once we know for certain than AGI can be developed and it will cause troubles, there's already less developed AIs, generating huge heaps of money for certain companies and they will be heavily lobbying against any kind of regulation. And this won't be just traditional lobbying towards to the elected officials. Just think how powerful a company like Facebook, but equipped with more advanced AI could be at altering the public opinion if it decides to go all in and use all the powers it has.
- Animats 9y agoPart of Musk’s worry stems from social destabilization and job loss. “When I say everything, the robots will do everything, bar nothing,” he said. That's still a ways off. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments is still terrible. See the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. People have been underestimating that problem for at least 40 years. But that doesn't help with the job situation. Only 14% of the US workforce is in manufacturing, mining, construction, and agriculture, the jobs where robot manipulation in unstructured environments matters. Those aren't the jobs at risk. I've been saying for a while that the near future is "Machines should think, people should work". An Amazon warehouse is an expression of that concept. So are some fast-food restaurants. So is Uber. The computers handle the planning and organization of work; the humans are just hands for the computers. (Yes, "Manna", by Marshall Brain.) That's going to become more common. Computers are just better at organization and communication than humans. Computers have already made a big dent in middle-class jobs, and that's going to continue. If everything you do goes in and out over a wire, you're very vulnerable to automation. If 20% of what you do can't be done by a computer, that means five of you will be replaced by one person. This is already hitting low-level lawyers; it hit paralegals years ago. The end state of this trend is a modest number of well-paid people in control, a huge number of people taking orders from computers, and many people without jobs. That's not far away; one or two decades. It's mostly deploying technology that already exists.
- eksemplar 9y agoIf you compare factory lines from 100-150 years ago, we've cut out around 90% of the workers. If you look at office spaces pre and post computers they have roughly the same amount of people. AI is going to do to the office space what robots did to factories. It'll be a slow unnoticeable process for the most part. Automation of a single process may save as little as 5 minutes a day per workflow, but eventually it adds up to a position not getting rehired as it usually would have. Sure the AI business will create jobs, but not as many as it replaces and try telling a lawyer to go back to school to get a relevant education.
- Nuzzerino 9y agoIn that case, I can't wait. Every office I've worked in lately has been overcrowded, noisy, and distracting.
- tanilama 9y agoBut his company is among one of those companies that are ruthlessly pursuing AI technology for its own commercial purpose, like self driving car. Did he just contradict himself a little in that sense?
- simonh 9y agoNot at all. Cars and roads are fantastically dangerous, many thousands of people die every year, but we still build cars and roads. It's the same for AI. We need to treat the risks responsibly which means researching them and making informed judgements. That's what he's talking about.
- akira2501 9y ago> Cars and roads are fantastically dangerous, many thousands of people die every year, but we still build cars and roads. The statistics aren't that straight forward; for example, young men under the age of 24 are significantly over-represented in traffic deaths, so it's not entirely reasonable to assume the cars or roads are inherently dangerous. On top of that, we drive 3.1 trillion miles every year in the U.S alone and falling off a ladder at work kills about twice as many people than roadway fatalities do.
- cookingrobot 9y agoRoadways are 2% of deaths and falls are 0.69%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
- akira2501 9y agoWorldwide.. and that table is out of date, both catagories have increased in the new table. I can only speak to the statistics in the U.S. where ~36,000 people died according to NHTSA's FARS database. Of those, 6,000 were pedestrians. Whereas ~33,000 people died from falls or related causes according to the CDC. So, my ratio was wrong.. but I don't think it diminishes my point too significantly. Falls disproportionately affect the elderly.. as do traffic accidents, but the opportunities for risk are typically fewer as many elderly stop driving at some point, most die as passengers when they're involved in traffic accidents.
- borplk 9y agoIf anyone other than Musk was saying the EXACT same thing no one would care and they would have been laughed at. But Elon says something and everyone loses their minds. Let thoughts stand for themselves. Why attach so much weight to the speaker?
- AVTizzle 9y agoThis is a nice ideal, but not how the human brain works.
- jaimex2 9y agoBecause reputation counts. We listen to experts in their respective fields, Musk has a reputation as a future thinker with a track record to back it up. Also he doesn't just blurt out something without explaining it, his reasons are grounded.
- azinman2 9y agoBecause understanding the context of the speaker frames what you assume has been or not been considered to reach their conclusion. If I said search is a joke, you’d probably ignore it and move on, but if Sergei Brin said so you’d want to learn more.
- Nuzzerino 9y agoFor those interested, here is a Quora Q&A which has a lot of worthy debate on the AI Doomsaying research that Musk apparently bases his views on. https://www.quora.com/How-do-we-know-that-friendly-AI-research-is-actually-right-meaningful https://www.quora.com/How-do-we-know-that-friendly-AI-resear...
- guelo 9y agoI'm more apocalyptic about climate change. Ironically one of my few hopes is that some kind of AI can save us.
- jaimex2 9y agoI'm seeing a lot of comments with "this is crazy, AI wont reach that level", I'm not so sure after some of the stuff thats come out this year. https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/9/14558418/ai-deepmind-social-dilemma-study https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/9/14558418/ai-deepmind-socia... http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/07/13/google-deepmind-ai-walk/ http://www.highsnobiety.com/2017/07/13/google-deepmind-ai-wa...
- tlrobinson 9y agoPrequel to "Daemon" (the novel by Daniel Suarez): before his death, Matthew Sobol warns the world of the threat AI poses after accidentally creating The Daemon and losing control of it. The Daemon has gone into hibernation until the one person possibly able to stop it is dead. Also, Sobol previously started digital payments and self-driving car companies, which are repurposed by The Daemon for payments on the Darkent and AutoM8s...
- fxj 9y agoOne basic difference between humans and robots is sustainability and resilience even when something goes wrong big time. In the evolution of mankind the number of humans was reduced to several ten thousands and still we did survive as a species because the biology of reproduction makes us very resilient. Robots however need a vast infrastructure in to be produced and maintained which makes failure much more probable.
- alobat72 9y agoOne question that I keep asking myself is : If we build something that is equal to the brain from a functional and structural point of view - hypothetically build a topology of digital Neurons that mach the human brain - will that structure develop the same cognitive phenomenons like the human brain ?