Elon Musk - chief executive of car firm Tesla and rocket-maker SpaceX - has suggested that AI poses the greatest "existential threat" humankind faces.
Elon Musk: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon," he told an audience of students in October."
I think it's important to note that he is referring to "strong AI" which can potentially be much smarter than humans. Privacy is the least of our worries if we get strong AI. Even in a very conservative and best case scenario, the world would completely change when we can have computers do everything we can do now. However it will very likely be much crazier than that. 聽Imagine minds hundreds of thousands of times more intelligent than the best humans. They will be able to design technologies we can't even conceive of. They will hack computers better than the best human hackers. They will be able to manipulate people better than any human manipulator. The idea that we will be able to keep these things under control is just absurd.
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A lot of people are guilty of anthropomorphizing AI. Assuming they will be just like really smart humans. And that they will just somehow develop human emotions and values like empathy. Or that if they do kill us, at least they will be something like us and so be like our (genocidal) descendants in some sense. Have more imagination. Humans are just one point in the vast space of all possible minds. We could quite easily get something like a computable version of AIXI. AIXI has no consciousness, no emotions, nothing like humans. It's just a mathematical function which calculates the best action. Our current best AI are essentially just approximations of it. Use some machine learning algorithm to fit a model of the world, and use it to predict what action will lead to the most "reward". We keep making better and better learning algorithms. It's the entire goal of the field of AI. There is a huge economic incentive to do so .But no one is interested in making better utility functions. As long as they make better predictions or get higher scores in a video game, who cares? Wait until you are the scorer in the "game" and the AI tries to exploit you.
