Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk said Calling artificial intelligence more dangerous than nuclear warheads, there needs to be a regulatory body overseeing the development of super intelligence.
Musk pointed to machine intelligence playing the ancient Chinese strategy game Go to demonstrate rapid growth in AI's capabilities. For example, London-based company, DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence system, AlphaGo Zero, that learned to play Go without any human intervention. It learned simply from randomised play against itself. The Alphabet-owned company announced this development in a paper published in October.
Musk worries AI's development will outpace our ability to manage it in a safe way.
"So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity.
"It needs to be a public body that has insight and then oversight to confirm that everyone is developing AI safely. This is extremely important. The danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane.
"And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far. So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane."
In his analysis of the dangers of AI, Musk differentiates between case-specific applications of machine intelligence like self-driving cars and general machine intelligence, which he has described previously as having "an open-ended utility function" and having a "million times more compute power" than case-specific AI.
