VANITY FAIR: ELON MUSK’S BILLION-DOLLAR CRUSADE TO STOP THE A.I. APOCALYPSE
I strongly recommend that you take the time to read Maureen Dowd’s piece in Vanity Fair. She sits with Elon Musk, YC’s Sam Altman and others to talk AI. The text below is a excerpt from it in the hopes that it makes you go over to the VanityFair website and read the whole thing:
“If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead. “Only it won’t actually happen like that. It’s impossible for me to predict exactly how we’d lose, because the A.I. will be smarter than I am. When you’re building something smarter than you, you have to get it right on the first try.” I thought back to my conversation with Musk and Altman. Don’t get sidetracked by the idea of killer robots, Musk said, noting, “The thing about A.I. is that it’s not the robot; it’s the computer algorithm in the Net. So the robot would just be an end effector, just a series of sensors and actuators. A.I. is in the Net . . . . The important thing is that if we do get some sort of runaway algorithm, then the human A.I. collective can stop the runaway algorithm. But if there’s large, centralized A.I. that decides, then there’s no stopping it.” Altman expanded upon the scenario: “An agent that had full control of the Internet could have far more effect on the world than an agent that had full control of a sophisticated robot. Our lives are already so dependent on the Internet that an agent that had no body whatsoever but could use the Internet really well would be far more powerful.” Even robots with a seemingly benign task could indifferently harm us. “Let’s say you create a self-improving A.I. to pick strawberries,” Musk said, “and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries. So then it would have all the world be strawberry fields. Strawberry fields forever.” No room for human beings. But can they ever really develop a kill switch? “I’m not sure I’d want to be the one holding the kill switch for some superpowered A.I., because you’d be the first thing it kills,” Musk replied. Altman tried to capture the chilling grandeur of what’s at stake: “It’s a very exciting time to be alive, because in the next few decades we are either going to head toward self-destruction or toward human descendants eventually colonizing the universe.” “Right,” Musk said, adding, “If you believe the end is the heat death of the universe, it really is all about the journey.”Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x