Does anybody else find Musk's concerns about AI wildly overblown? Just to pick one example, does anyone really believe that autonomous weapons--most of which have yet to be developed--will be more dangerous than nuclear weapons are now?
In his case in particular, I feel there's a big disconnect between what he's saying and what the titles end up being. For example, he says there's a possibility we could live in a simulation and explains why, only to end up with a title like "Elon Musk thinks we live in the Matrix".
You could always say he knows more then most of us (classified research, etc.), but I think he's just talking about things that he fears _could_ happen and the media, and society, instead of engaging in some discussion about this, just treats it as tabloid - "look what Musk says, shock!".
Also, it's hard to argue that the world is "very safe" with nukes. All one can say is they have not been used recently. That's unlikely to last forever--or even much longer--the way things are going. The US and USSR barely avoided using them [0] and some of the current owners are a lot less stable.
[0] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 for one example.
I mean, if you have a large nation state who arguably has a very talented pool of programmers signaling that they are making a concerted effort into making autonomous military applications either so that they can either "rule" or "not be ruled".. well I wouldn't call being concerned about that 'overblown'
Just as a counter-example, let's consider something that really would alter the balance of power--reliable defense against ballistic missiles. This would render the nuclear arsenals of powers unable to afford such technology nearly useless against those that could.
Granted it's a judgement call but AI does not yet seem to be in the same league.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-r...
As for the lethal autonomous weapons, they're not going to be an existential threat[1]. For a start, if both sides have enough to kill the other side, that still leaves all the humans not involved in the war. And when the rubber hits the road, we know that machines are far from infallible; they break down all the time. Until machines can repair themselves (or run the full supply chain from raw resources to factory-made replacements), we don't have to fear for the existence of the human race.
[1] there is potential for a lot of suffering, sure, but how is that different to a human-run war?