Earlier this month I posted a blog entry regarding one of the most controversial issues at the nexus of technology and national security is concerns regarding the “militarization” of artificial intelligence – AI.
Initially an issue consigned to just a few defense-related publications and websites, it has now moved front and center. Some of what is said is shrill, but some if far less so.
That’s why I was taken by a piece in the New York Times entitled:
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots
with the subtitle
As the tech moguls disagree over the risks presented by something that doesn’t exist yet, all of Silicon Valley is learning about unintended consequences of A.I.
Here’s how it begins:
Mark Zuckerberg thought his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk was behaving like an alarmist.
Mr. Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX and the electric-car maker Tesla, had taken it upon himself to warn the world that artificial intelligence was “potentially more dangerous than nukes” in television interviews and on social media
So, on Nov. 19, 2014, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, invited Mr. Musk to dinner at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. Two top researchers from Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab and two other Facebook executives joined them.
As they ate, the Facebook contingent tried to convince Mr. Musk that he was wrong. But he wasn’t budging. “I genuinely believe this is dangerous,” Mr. Musk told the table, according to one of the dinner’s attendees, Yann LeCun, the researcher who led Facebook’s A.I. lab.
Mr. Musk’s fears of A.I., distilled to their essence, were simple: If we create machines that are smarter than humans, they could turn against us. (See: “The Terminator,” “The Matrix,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Let’s for once, he was saying to the rest of the tech industry, consider the unintended consequences of what we are creating before we unleash it on the world.
Neither Mr. Musk nor Mr. Zuckerberg would talk in detail about the dinner, which has not been reported before, or their long-running A.I. debate.
The creation of “superintelligence” — the name for the supersmart technological breakthrough that takes A.I. to the next level and creates machines that not only perform narrow tasks that typically require human intelligence (like self-driving cars) but can actually outthink humans — still feels like science fiction. But the fight over the future of A.I. has spread across the tech industry.
You can read the full article here
