Canada Journal – News of the World Articles and videos to bring you the biggest Canadian news stories from across the country every day
Even with excitement growing over the prospect of driverless cars and the development of machines that are smarter than ever, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk warns artificial intelligence could in fact present a greater threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.
Musk, the CEO of the space transport company SpaceX, warned in a tweet during the weekend humans, by relying so much on technology, are turning the human brain to mush.
Musk added that humanity should be “super careful” with such technology, making the comments while recommending Superintelligence, a book by Nick Bostrom that explores the future of humanity when machines surpass us in intelligence.
Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford and director of The Future of Humanity Institute there, says that most scientists agree that the creation of a human-level AI is inevitable, reporting that 90 per cent of top researchers guess that we’ll achieve this goal between 2075 and 2090.
Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
However, he argues, the really important issue is what we do with this first super intelligent creation – and how we build it. Whatever AI surpasses human-level intelligence first will have the advantage over pretty much everything and everyone else on Earth.
Bostrom says that if we accidently create an AI that is anything less than well-inclined towards humans (comparisons have been made with the whimsical but ultimately benevolent computer ‘Minds’ in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels) then the results could be disastrous.
But if we do create a superintelligence that is obedient or endowed with a sense of ethics like Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics then the rewards could also be staggering, accelerating human progress at unimaginable rates. After all, how can we even begin to imagine what a post-human intelligence is capable of when we are still resolutely human?
Musk, however, is apparently inclined towards gloomier predictions, with his subsequent tweet imagining humanity as the “biological boot loader” (the preliminary bit of software that loads an operating system) for a “digital superintelligence”. Thanks, Elon, we’ve seen the Matrix too.
Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
Agencies/Canadajournal
