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posted by LaminatorX on Monday October 27 2014, @11:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the doctor-faustus dept.

Elon Musk was recently interviewed at an MIT Symposium. An audience asked his views on artificial intelligence (AI). Musk turned very serious, and urged extreme caution and national or international regulation to avoid "doing something stupid" he said.

"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon", said Musk. "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.' Doesn't work out."

Read the story and see the full interview here.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 27 2014, @12:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 27 2014, @12:08PM (#110478)

    but there should be a limit to such things

    Sometimes thats hard to define. So its no serious terror if you let a computer apply simple current limits to the grid to match reality (OK computer send as many MWh eastward as possible to make us money, but do it while never exceeding current limits on any individual line)

    Then you add some automated trading to figure out the most profitable place to sell your power at any given time.

    Next thing you know some switchgear that was depreciated assuming it would switch "somewhat less than daily" is getting toggled on and off like a strobe light and it fails early and very expensively.

    Stick enough negative resistance loads like switching power supplies on the grid, and add some unpredictable sources (solar, wind) and the end result is with slow dumb humans running it, the inevitable failure will happen soon and it'll be a small fail, easily repairable. Lets say we lose all of Illinois for three days and all the nukes scram and cant boot up for like a week. In general that wouldn't be so big of a deal and the small temporary loss would be "highly motivating" to avoid it. Put a computer in charge and it'll last longer and get more brittle such that when it does fail, maybe we lose power nationwide for a couple months in some areas. Blackstarting plants is no laughing matter and quite a few plants just can't do it either technically or via regulation and how you'd "boot up" a completely powered down grid is an interesting puzzle.

    I wonder what the biggest grid is thats ever been blackstarted "in the modern era" not in 1914. Probably some tropical island after a hurricane? Cuba maybe? I bet that was exciting.

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  • (Score: 1) by Skwearl on Monday October 27 2014, @02:09PM

    by Skwearl (4314) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 27 2014, @02:09PM (#110512)

    For North America that would be the outage of 2003. We lost the Northeast power grid. Same grid went down in '65. That is around 50 million people across 2 countries.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 27 2014, @02:22PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 27 2014, @02:22PM (#110520)

      Hmm interesting I knew about the Philippines outage this summer from the hurricane shutting down pretty much the whole island, but thats only 40 or so million. Lots of call centers have moved from India to the Philippines. Supposedly even cheaper.

      Also I heard about a blackout in India affecting about 1/2 billion people in 2012.