Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
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 serious or not - it's hard to know since we haven't really dealt with an intelligence that wasn't created through natural selection with those biases for survival. We also don't really understand how consciousness works either.
One risk of AI is that if Musk's argument is right we won't be as 'lucky' as we were with nuclear weapons. Enriched uranium is hard to get so nuclear weapons are easier to control and hard for an individual to make. Turning on an AI or copying the code for one and spreading it would probably be easier. If it does end up being dangerous that's not a great situation.
That scenario reminds me of the opening of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep.
What people never mention in any discussion with AI is that the AI will be as limited by physical world as we are. AI It's not just code, it's also the hardware that will run the code. That hardware has theoretical and practical limits, and requires a lot of power. It's not like AI running on some peta/exascale supercomputer will be able to jump to your laptop and take it over and spread itself to every electronic device in the world.
That's exactly a proposed scenario - with the form of "jumping" being any kind of communication. See: The AI Box problem.
To take over the world such AI would need to learn everything we already know about the world, not only including math and physics, but also including sociology and human behavior. While AI would be busy taking over the world, you would have to assume that we would be sitting, doing nothing, and that we would not be smart enough to figure out that something is going on. And when we did we would do nothing to stop it.
Is it possible, sure.. Likely? hell no.
Just think how much money and time we have to spend to test just a few of all of the theories in physics. And no, AI will not be able to suddenly come up with better theories simply by simulating physical world.
If I have a theory that humans will evolve into separate species, I can't say someone else's understanding on the matter is limited.
The main problem is the term AI is overloaded and overused so it creates confusion.
Musk is not against the machine learning approach to solving a new class of useful problems (though replacing a lot of current human jobs and the political risk associated with that is an issue to think about)
[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-do...
I'll add another set of concerns you see in these discussions.
People know that the current version of predatory Capitalism we've created so far would happily mass unemploy everyone (possibly all the white collar workers reading this much sooner then you think). This would leave no workers and no consumers with money outside of the ultrawealthy.
I agree. I don't trust the current version of capitalism to program these AI of the future. I think they will burn the house down in their greed.
AI is being used as a workaround to existing anti-discrimination laws. The core of anti-discrimination law is that it doesn't matter if you think on the average my group of people is a worse credit risk or more likely to rob your taxi or more likely to trash your rental property; you need to judge me by the risk of the general population.
AI allows you to create a black box which will inevitably find proxies for race and spit out a higher risk for some races than others. Race won't directly appear in the model but what does will be strongly correlated with race.
Sort of a nitpick, but people concerned about AI risk usually don't postulate that an AI needs to be """conscious""" to be dangerous; it just needs to be a thing that can apply a lot of optimization power in unexpected ways toward goals that aren't perfectly aligned with what humans generally want.
... but we already have that, right? Undesirable outcomes from rulesets that govern the behaviour of a large number of (conscious or unconscious) actors are a pretty standard feature of civilisation
So far I'm inclined to think that the whole 'sentient AI mucking things up' is jumping the gun (to put it mildly). I might very well be wrong though.
However, it's only because of HN that I even bother to make the distinction between that particular fear (realistic or otherwise) and the much more directly useful discussion of how AI-type stuff (even just facebook feed algorithms) can be dangerous or harmful.
I won't claim to know what the right amount of effort directed toward this is though, nor do I really think AI safety research has a >epsilon chance of accomplishing its goal if it turns out to be relevant at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"The goal of maximizing paperclips is chosen for illustrative purposes because it is very unlikely to be implemented, and has little apparent danger or emotional load (in contrast to, for example, curing cancer or winning wars). This produces a thought experiment which shows the contingency of human values: An extremely powerful optimizer (a highly intelligent agent) could seek goals that are completely alien to ours (orthogonality thesis), and as a side-effect destroy us by consuming resources essential to our survival."
> Our algorithm’s performance is only as good as the human evaluator’s intuition about what behaviors look correct, so if the human doesn’t have a good grasp of the task they may not offer as much helpful feedback. Relatedly, in some domains our system can result in agents adopting policies that trick the evaluators. For example, a robot which was supposed to grasp items instead positioned its manipulator in between the camera and the object so that it only appeared to be grasping it, as shown below.
[0] https://blog.openai.com/deep-reinforcement-learning-from-hum...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545298 78 upvotes, 7 comments
"AI is the future" really means that Zuckerberg sees the massive potential of automation, and how it's going to change the face of the world.
"We should be worried about AI" really means that Musk has had to think long and hard about the fact that the software written by Tesla is navigating living human beings around obstacles at high speeds.
This isn't about some accidental super intelligence that becomes self-aware and murders all humans, it's about the consequences of applying today's standards of "let's ship this code" to technology that we're expected to entrust with our lives.
This is two things, combined: "AI" means that code will have more complex emergent behavior that's harder to debug than current code, which is already nearly impossible to completely debug. "AI" also means that this code will run very complex systems that often have powerful hardware components, unfortunately including weapons.
To put it another way: Both men agree that the code of the near future is going to make a massive leap in effectiveness and real-world applications. But Musk has to grapple with being held morally accountable for that code, while the only thing Zuckerberg's ever had to care about is performance. Say "AI" to Mark Zuckerberg and he sees all of the money in smarter data mining and fun home appliances. Say "AI" to Elon Musk and he has nightmares of deploying a wireless update that causes Teslas to confuse people wearing green clothing with green traffic lights.
> 50% of experts think there’s at least a ten percent chance of above-human-level AI coming within the next ten years.
(ten years!? sheesh)
> And 40% of experts think that there’s a better-than-even chance that, once we get above-human level AI, it will “explode” to suddenly become vastly more intelligent than humans.
> And 70% of experts think that Stuart Russell makes a pretty good point when he says that without a lot of research into AI goal alignment, AIs will probably have their goals so misaligned with humans that they could become dangerous and hostile.
> ... 5% think this is “among the most important problems in the field”. Only a tenth – 1.4% – think it’s “much more valuable” than other things they could be working on.
Not totally clear which of those Zuckerburg wouldn't agree with, but this isn't exactly a fringe concern anymore, even if most people think it's not worth thinking about yet.
When you have the likes of people like Stephen Hawking agreeing with Musk, why wouldn't you listen and be wary. Mark doesn't seem like a very intelligent person, just a very lucky person.
Musk sells / appeals to techies, and those seeking to embrace cutting edge technology and are not scared by "AI is dangerous" talk.
Different audience, different messaging.
Elon's claimed that Tesla will have level 5 autonomous vehicles in 2 years. Yeah, in your dreams Elon, that's a massive cognitive stack you can't fit in the vehicle, one we've never built out to such a degree, and your car's autonomy level is going to be a function of its bandwidth to the cloud anyway. The mean part of me wonders if Elon plans on covering this wild assertion with 'Well, we can't now. Regulations and stuff' - if he's just worried about putting a weapon on a solar powered drone that patrols some area and shoots baddies, yeah me too. But that's just human stupidity, it ain't AI, it ain't intelligent, it's just a dumb program with effectors. All ML really is these days is real big boundary relaxation systems, calculating the massive number of coefficients we need to make the equations work out the way we want. But come on, it's stupider than a rock. It's an equation solver and its brittle as hell. As a tool I love what we can now accomplish, but there's a long road from here to Hal. It's not bloody magic, it's just math.
...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 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.
The possibility of using AI to surveil and manipulate Facebook users (and non-users) on a mass scale (and probably give his presidential campaign a boost along the way) is worth far too much money for Zuckerberg to admit to the potential downsides.
Zuckerberg isn't optimistic about AI, he's optimistic about the money and power AI will grant him.
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
AI is automation, systems of automation. People could automate to the point of leading to a constant flow of horrific things happening, creating a highly efficient war machine - whether against another nation or your own people. This is likely what Elon is thinking about - other than the possibility that a real AI system is developed that is given the ability to manage resources, e.g. Ex Machina (film).
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.
Is that what humanity should strive for? Create form of Intelligence that can sustain itself with less waste?
Calling someone who is trying to create better future for his 5 kids "monkey-centric" is pretty offensive. I wish there were more "monkey-centric" people out there.
Edit: No playfulness on HN allowed today apparently
Musk is a generation above Zuckerberg. 13 years older. Musk is better as an innovator while Zuckerberg is better at business. Zuck has like 69 Billion while Musk has about 16 Billion
I mean, there's no doubt he's smart, even brilliant... but being brilliant in one field doesn't necessarily mean you are an expert in others.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dol...
“If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, don’t imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone else’s. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.
Musk dismisses AI experts who tell him that his claims bear no resemblance to real technology, because Musk isn't talking about the same AI as them. He's talking about sci-fi AI.
There are no experts in sci-fi AI because, if there were anything there that one could understand well enough to be an expert in it, it wouldn't be sci-fi AI anymore.
It would apply to both though :)
Have you ever talked to someone who is way smarter than you? Have you tried to imagine how they think? I suspect thinking about the future of AI is a little bit like that, insofar as it's hard to model the future state intelligently.
My simple understanding of this all is that once we create AI that surpasses the intelligence of the human race, we as inferior beings will no longer be able to predict what they will do. If that's the case and the desire of AI (can AI have desire...?) runs contrary to human will, then there's no way to cut it that bodes well for the continued existence of the human race. And once that line is crossed, it's never going back.
Is that not a reasonable thing to be worried about even if it's 200 years away? Even On the Origin of Species was published only ~160 years ago.
But he is wrong.
Artificial Conscience(what he is referring to) is NEVER going to be achieved. I repeat NEVER. Its impossible.
Conscience is in the form and not in the matter. In one word, there is never going to be an AI with free will.
However, eventually we may build a super intelligent system with great power over our lives, that goes wrong, has bugs, or misbehaves. But, since the fact that such as system will never be conscious, we are always going to have power over it.
So yeah, Musk is being an alarmist, and I believe he is the one with a limited understanding of AI.
Call it conscience, intelligence, whatever you want. The danger isn't that some ominously calculating and murderous robotic mind is going to spring into being and hide from humans while plotting our downfall. In order to understand the danger, all you have to do is look at what the US military is already doing with autonomous weapons. Killer robots aren't hypothetical, they're historical.
In fact, you're the prime example of the danger of AI. You probably have a stronger than average understanding of computers, and maybe you know a lot about actual AI implementations, which is what makes you so self-assured that there's nothing magical about them. So you trust them, and you're a big fan of throwing an ever-increasing amount of trust into AI.
You even admit that there will be bugs (there always are) and misbehavior (now who's humanizing programs?), but you fail to see why that's a problem when the stakes are raised from "crap, an app leaked private data online" to "crap, the autonomous weaponized drone mistook backyard fireworks for an attack and bombed a family."
The way I see it, Musk is far from alarmist, and all the kidding about "summoning demons" is almost a way of coping with what's starting to seem like a terrifying inevitability. We've been building "dumb programs" for decades, and there's still a constant stream of breaking news about software that didn't do what it was supposed to. And you want to believe that there's no danger in building software that has increasingly fuzzy logic and connecting it to real-world I/O?
I'm guessing that Elon Musk saw this problem when he first started toying with the idea of self-driving cars. You say he has a limited understanding of AI, but Tesla autopilot says otherwise. And he probably became keenly aware of the stakes when he realized that people would willingly entrust their lives to the decisions made by his company's software, and that without regulation, it's entirely up to Tesla's QA process to make sure their cars don't accidentally kill people.