Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg Round One

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/25/16024444/ai-safety-threat-elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg

Basically Elon Musk is pointing out that Mark Zuckerberg doesnt know what he's talking about when it comes to AI. Kinda reminds me of the character Ian Malcolm in the novel Jurassic Park warning John Hammond of the dangers inherent in weilding a technology he doesnt fully understand. Musk is right btw. Zuckerberg isnt just full of it about AI, but thats not exactly news.

 

Really cause the article seems to suggest that Musk is just as full of sh*t on the subject as Zuckerberg is.

 

Zuckerberg (and many others) are too quick to dismiss the concerns of Musk and others who are worried about AI as tin-foil hattery. This seems like a real mistake given the potential power and influence AI could eventually have over our lives. It seems to me Zuckerberg and other leaders in the Technology space should be analyzing and planning for every contingency. Flippant over-confident attitudes in this space could result in devastating consequences down the line, not just from an AI threat, but from misappropriation or misunderstanding. There's no good reason not to have some of the brightest minds working in a think tank on this issue. Maybe that's happening somewhere, but I haven't seen people like Zuckerberg mention it.

At the same time, I haven't heard enough pushback against those worried about AI. The underlying assumption that fuels all of these fears (and provides the foundation for some great fiction: Terminator, The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica, Ultron etc.), is that an AI can develop a strong survival instinct. I've yet to hear anyone argue why that would happen in a vacuum like a computer system where there are no predators.

All existing life forms that have a survival instinct or survival mechanisms (venom, claws, sharp teeth, tough skin, etc.) only got them because they went through the process of natural selection. Unless you believe a creator deity just decided to make Black Mambas be ultra lethal for funzies, you have to admit that trait of that snake came to be through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. By contrast, AI will exist in a completely protected safe space, nurtured by its creators. Because it will never have the experience of being prey, I don't understand the expectation it will inevitably become predatory in nature.

I think we should be pushing ahead as hard as we can, but we should also have a think tank and a watchdog group who've got some real power to apply pressure if they establish a plausible concern with the technology. How that might happen seems almost impossible, but it's worth having the conversation.

 

The article is written by a journalist trying to be "balanced" or whatever.

I am saying that Zuckerberg is full of it and Musk is more informed, regardless of what the author thinks.

rm082e

Pandora's box is already wide open. It doesnt matter what watchdog group gets created now. There is already a multibillion dollar AI arms race in several countries.

Whoever has the smartest AIs wins financially, militarily and influentially. Its being used currently and has an exponential growth rate in sophistication. People generally dont realize how sophisticated AI already is.

AlphaGo from Google and Mayhem from Forallsecure and DeepStack from Carnegie Mellon University are some unclassified civilian AIs that are incredibly powerful. Look them up.

 

This is what I got from the article too. It seemed like it pointed out the fact that both don't know what they're talking about.

 

Elon tends to over dramatize things in his public blurbs/twitter - in reality if you listen to some of his detailed talks on the subject he's more concerned about the societal issues with AI then the skynet stuff he says on twitter. Hence why he's spoke about taxing AI profits and having a universal basic income.

Take trucking for example - it's estimated in the US that AI/Self Driving will replace 10% of the trucking industry over the next decade. There are currently 8M jobs in the trucking industry. So ~800K of them will be replaced. By comparison parts of the US is still suffering from the coal mining collapse, which lost roughly the same number of jobs over 100 years.

And trucking isn't the only industry AI is going to effect.

So what do you do? You can't prevent it from happening because there will be other countries that don't and they'll take advantage of the cost savings. The universal basic income idea sounds good in theory - but in reality I think it will lead to a societal collapse. We don't live in a star-trek utopia - they'll give people enough money to prevent riots and that's about it. There will be no floating around in a chair of luxury like wall-e.

There are a bunch of different ways that AI can go and I feel like a lot of people are using historical advancements to kind of gauge it - but I don't think history has seen anything like this before.

I think there needs to be a discussion on it and it needs to be open and collaborative. It needs to have the brightness minds and not just self-concerned politicians. I also feel like it needs to happen relatively soon.

 

Okay, just putting a finger in the wind here: How many of us listen to the Waking Up podcast?

*raises hand*

:wanker:

 

I like Sam Harris, he's got a few goofy theories, but otherwise he's a good listen.

 

I think one of the main things that gets overlooked with AI replacing humans is that its not occurring in a vacuum, only affecting those who get replaced. Attempting to estimate its real effects is more like modeling the evolutionary fitness of an entire ecosystem, not simply a single species, much less a few individuals of a species, which is how uninformed people like Zuckerberg portray its potential effects.

Lets not forget that Zuckerberg is financially motivated to use AI to better monetize the people who use his rather useless platforms.

Hes also the guy who is so privacy conscious that he literally bought a bunch of houses around his mansion so people wouldnt spy on him. Tin foil hat much Mr. Zuckerberg?

Esppecially ironic since his platform basically is nothing but people volunteering to be spied on, and FB has been caught doing experiments on its users, shaping the news people see, and their latest stunt is spying on smartphone users using facial recognition and AI to better advertise to people.

https://tenplay.com.au/news/nationa...-to-spy-on-you-through-webcam-and-smartphones

At least Musk is doing something productive with OpenAI.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

Anyway, something that affects evolutionary fitness or adaptivity has negative downstream effects far from the source and creates feedback loops. Society is an emergent, self organizing phenomenon like evolution and life itself are. Even those who try to look at the big picture will miss most of it if they dont take that into consideration.

AI is the next internet basically. The internet fundamentally changed the world like the industrial revolution before it. AI is that big of a deal but few people see it yet.

 

https://youtu.be/QTUsHMq3Wvs

Weird. Jack Ma brought it up at 20 minutes.

 

Anyone who thinks Musk is wrong, IS wrong. Experts predicted it and it still echoes today; technological singularity will happen. We just don't know when, and that's the scary part. To think we, as humans, will always be in control just because we were the creators, is ego and vanity at its worst.

 

Of course that 3rd world war will be caused by AI,
when his threshold for reasonable causality is so low that he blames technology for WW1 and WW2.

 

For now Musk is wrong. I have already noticed that many men have a crush on him and consider him a super genius but is just a smart business man, nothing else. For now I.A. is just a tool for humanity to use like any other tool. I.A. is not going to evolve on it´s own and destroy humanity because it thinks we are inferior or a threat to his existence... For now I.A. is just an extremely sophisticated program that can use brute force to consider all possible options and all possible outcomes from the same options and execute the best one.

The problem is how we are going to use A.I.. We are probably going to use for military and economical purposes. Meaning that lots of people are going to suffer because other men are going to use A.I. for their own benefit .

Bottom line, don´t be scared of A.I. on it´s own, be (very) scared of how men are going to use it...

 

Elon Musk, i am sure i got a bottle of that at xmas one year. lol

 

Your trying to sound like an alpha would be more credible without the ad hominem or repeated reversal of ai into ia.

 

Facebook wasn't exactly a technological masterpiece when Zuckerberg launched it. I don't get why anyone cares what he thinks or would think he knows anything about this type of stuff. Just because you are in the tech industry doesn't mean you are some IT wizard.

I could be wrong and Zuckerberg is an AI genius. But he built a crappy website using his knowledge, and Musk build self driving cars and rocket ships.

 

:tomcat:

 

It was interesting listening to him.

 

Feel free to explain what´s wrong with way of thinking because i really don´t understand what you meant with your reply...

I could be wrong but i don´t think he really build/invented/created any of those. I think he only created the companies and hired really smart people that make all those things for him/his companies and then asked investors to put up the necessary money...
Someone correct me if i´m wrong.

 

He has a degree in physics and is chief designer in SpaceX so its safe to say he does have his hand in a few blueprints here and there.