Artificial Intelligence: Good or Bad?

Where are we wrt Artificial Intelligence? Facebook uses it for targeted ads and tagging your photos. Microsoft and Apple use AI to run their digital assistants on your phone. Google’s search engine uses AI. To some extent, we are already a weak form of cyborgs: don’t our phones feel like an extension of us? But this level of AI isn’t what scares its detractors: after all, none of the above seems to run the risk of running amok and taking over the world.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Telsa, is one of the guys in the tech field who is scared about AI:
“With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”

Here’s a graphic on different people’s takes on AI:



Given how tied AI is to Google’s areas of operation (search, driverless cars etc), they have been buying up almost every interesting company in the field. And so, fears author Ashley Vance:
“If evil A.I. lights up, it will light up first at Google.”
Remind you of the Terminator?

To which Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg counters:
“If we slow down progress in deference to unfounded concerns, we stand in the way of real gains.”
Nick Bostrom wrote a book, Superintelligence, on AI: parts of the book were on the “control problem”. How do you control an entity far, far smarter than you? Can you ever be totally sure that it won’t be able manipulate you to “escape” from the control box? Would a Kill switch be sure to work?

Elon Musk says one of the solutions is to get away from earth. Like going to Mars (which, by the way, is exactly one of his companies works on). But as others point out, AI would probably just follow us to Mars! In fact, as Bostrom wrote in his book, AI could well expand into space regardless of human presence there. Its only limit, as per Bostrom? The fact that the universe is expanding. Ergo, parts of the universe will, at different points, travel faster than the speed of light and be beyond access forever… but I am guessing that limit doesn’t exactly comfort the likes of Musk.

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