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Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

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Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#41

Post by naveen99 »

gonehome wrote: post #26

They're talking past each other because "AI" has become a useless term. Musk's comments are about a potential (maybe conscious) artificial super intelligence and the risks that could come from that if we enable one somehow without understanding the preconditions. Zuckerberg is just talking about "AI" in the sense that machine learning can solve a valuable class of problems. The super intelligence risk could be seriou…

But AI is not just bits in cold storage. It would need a lot of computing power and or bandwidth. it would need money and power also.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#42

Post by pesenti »

A majority of the experts in AI would side with Zuckerberg on this one. See for example: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/07/18/artific.... It's not that we shouldn't worry about AI, it's that the issue Musk is raising - AI as an existential threat -, is distracting from the real issues.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#44

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jdietrich wrote: post #32
__s wrote: post #17

Seems this pivots on a disagreement of AI as a risk Musk seems very anxious of existential threats-- it isn't surprising he may overestimate the danger of AI It also comes off as very monkey-centric. Is it so bad if human intelligence isn't what proliferates the future? Perhaps AI is a kind of memetic evolution for our culture, evolving into a form of life which can achieve sustenance with much less waste

>It also comes off as very monkey-centric. Is it so bad if human intelligence isn't what proliferates the future? For humans, it's an absolute disaster - look at what happened to the lesser apes when Homo Sapiens became dominant. The odds are very good that a sentient AI will decimate us or make us extinct, simply by adapting our habitat to its own needs.

Are you expecting that Sapiens Sapiens would somehow last as a species forever?

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#46

Post by mcmacintosh »

Honestly I'm pretty appalled by Musk's statements. There's no indication from recent research that we're close to the "dreadful super intelligence". I think he has an a very naive and scifi-ish understanding of the state of AI and his fear mongering is irresponsible at best. Or maybe he's right and private companies are so technologically advanced that they surpass academia by a wide margin. Somehow I highly doubt that.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#47

Post by caio1982 »

pesenti wrote: post #42

A majority of the experts in AI would side with Zuckerberg on this one. See for example: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/07/18/artific... . It's not that we shouldn't worry about AI, it's that the issue Musk is raising - AI as an existential threat -, is distracting from the real issues.

Was Isaac Asimov being distracted from the real issues as well just a few decades ago? Food for thought :-)

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#49

Post by AndrewKemendo »

arcanus wrote: post #37
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #35

Mark Recruited Yann Lecun, arguably the top "AI" practitioner in modern times (backprop anyone?). Lecun agrees with Mark and I would be surprised if Mark wasn't taking most of his direction in AI from Lecun.

Good point. Another noted expert in "AI" is Andrew Ng (formerly Google and Baidu) who stated that, "Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars." ...For some reason Elon is really hung up on gradient-based descent methods terminating all of humanity. We just aren't close to that possibility yet. It is not even in sight.

The problem is that both are potentially right.

The majority of the ML field still ignores entirely the AGI discipline - and in general rightly so as there are enough narrow problems to solve to fill a lifetime. That's the perspective of Lecun/Ng etc... because they are scientists.

The others Bostrom et al. are philosophers, so they approach it from a different perspective.

There are valuable reasons to think about it at both levels.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#50

Post by danso »

As overloaded as the term "AI" has become, to the point where mainstream discussion is unlikely to be substantative, I'm glad a tech-business leader like Elon Musk is at least taking a public position of some skepticism. AI can be as empowering or as dangerous as we design and constrain it -- but to a layperson, AI and "algorithms" seem like inevitable magic, in the way that iPhones have steadily "improved" in hardware specs and in life-augmenting features.
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