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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: 2) by Lagg on Monday October 27 2014, @06:33PM

    by Lagg (105) on Monday October 27 2014, @06:33PM (#110628) Homepage Journal

    Even I was surprised to see someone like Musk say something so uncomfortable and stupid and I never really liked him in the first place (not because of anything personal, I've just been burned before like I'm sure many others have upon seeing this article). It's just plain awkward that he's ignorant enough to go to an MIT event, the MIT that is famous for its AI lab and proceed to talk about AI like it's some kind of supernatural pseudo-religious thing. It's software and always will be. Subject to the same bugs that other software is. The harm that'll come from it if any is people anthropomorphizing it like he is and acting like it's anything but software. Which will lead to people either trusting it too much (leading to stuff way worse than what you've seen with buggy car systems) or act like it's really a demon and never want to use it or experiment.

    and yes, that's really all it is. Software. I know we like to masturbate our brains with philosophical discourse and thought experiments about it but the AI that people who aren't us think of is so hilariously unattainable right now it might as well be in its own category of science fiction. Before we even get close to the skynetdemon type of arrangement we'll first need to figure out how to write decent heuristics and then figure out how to supply a human's life experience of stimuli to software in a way that they can process in a generic and self learning manner, which again requires writing decent heuristics first.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @08:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27 2014, @08:13PM (#110650)

    Yes, well, your credentials as a video game programmer certainly bring gravitas to the discussion. So nice to hear the truth from someone in the know. I'm so tired of hearing those daydreams from those Grace Hopper award recipients Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil.

    • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday October 27 2014, @08:53PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Monday October 27 2014, @08:53PM (#110659) Journal

      Ray Kurzweil made his money by writing OCR software for blind people. Ray Kurzweil's book: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is about as deep as Nicholas Negroponte's book: Being Digital - that is, not at all. Overall, I'd say that a games programmer brings more gravitas to a discussion about the dangers of general purpose artificial intelligence.

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