What do you think about the AI apocalypse or the doomsday that some experts are warning the entire mankind about? Is it just a figment of imagination or just fun to talk about the Transformer type scenarios in the real world or is it really happening and we are actually doomed?
As far as the Silicon Valley's leaders are concerned, the industry, which creates the artificially intelligent lives itself is quite divided on the stand. While Tesla chief Elon Musk has been banging the drum about the dangers of super-intelligent AI for quite some time now, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg thinks such doomsday scenario is overrated. While Bill Gates, the tech billionaire, has expressed concerns about the rise of AI, now Google's AI chief John Giannandrea has entered the forum siding with Zuckerberg.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Giannandrea said, "There's a huge amount of unwarranted hype around AI right now," reported Bloomberg. "This leap into, 'Somebody is going to produce a superhuman intelligence and then there's going to be all these ethical issues' is unwarranted and borderline irresponsible," he added.
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The idea of "superhuman intelligence" is the key factor in play and this is what causes the fear. The fear is that in the near future the artificially intelligent systems will reach a certain point of complexity, which will be beyond human understanding and then these AI lives will be impossible to control. These AI lives that we are talking about are not going to be just really smart computers, but they'll be some entities akin to alien consciousness (and superhuman intelligence remember!), with impenetrable intent and morality, say experts, who think the threat is real.
Now let's come to the ones, who feel the whole idea is exaggerated. According to them, the AI programs that they create are much dumber than you think and they possess a narrow intelligence level, which means they are only good for some specific tasks. As Giannandrea said at the event, "They're not nearly as general purpose as a 4-year-old child."
However, what's wrong in taking precautions, right? They might not be super intelligent, but who said apocalypse had to be clever?
