When data becomes dangerous: Why Elon Musk is right and wrong about AI
Elon Musk is apparently worried about humans becoming subservient to artificially intelligent computers. I think the notion is a bit absurd. I’d argue the sci-fi nightmare more likely to become reality thanks to AI has to do with big-brother states and corporate manipulation of consumers’ lives. I’d also argue that the likelihood of any of these scenarios coming true — mine or Musk’s — has everything to do with the laws governing our personal data.
To recap, Musk made the following comment Saturday on Twitter, referring to a forthcoming book called Superintelligence. “Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” He followed up on Sunday with a tweet reading, “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable”.
Artificial intelligence and, more broadly, machine learning, really boil down to data — how much of it computers can ingest and what they can learn from it. When we start talking about applied AI — like in robots, or even just in Google image search — we add in the additional step of what these systems can do because of what they’ve learned. As it turns out, it looks like the answer to all three questions is plenty.
If you’re into dire predictions about the future of American society, or even of mankind as a whole, the technologies currently under development today — from wearable computers to deep learning systems — should provide plenty of fodder for dystopian scenarios about how our data might be used to control us. Probably ones that seem much more imminent than they did decades ago.
However, it need not be that way. If the world’s governments and societies can effectively regulate the flow of data among citizens, corporations, governments and computers, it’s entirely possible we’ll be able to experience the benefits of AI without too many of the cons. Life might change, we’ll probably have to accept ever-evolving relationships with the technology around us, but it doesn’t have to control us.
I think the fear of supremely intelligent computers that Musk espoused is rather unlikely in the foreseeable future. Mostly, this is because I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with machine learning experts — the people actually building the models and writing the algorithms that control these systems — and reading about their research to get a sense of where we’re at and where we’re headed.
Building an AI system that excels at a particular task — even a mundane one such as recognizing breeds of dogs — is hard, manual work. Even so-called “self-learning” systems need lots of human tuning at every other step in the process. Making disparate systems work together to provide any sort of human-like concept of reality would be even harder still.
If humans want to create super-intelligent beings that outsmart us, that are smart enough to turn on us even, we’ll probably have to specifically set out to build them. It’s not outside the realm of possibility — we’ve created nuclear and biological weapons — but it seems entirely preventable.
But build up enough of those disparate systems that are really good at certain tasks, and you have the making for some big problems. Some potential scenarios are already obvious because of the companies that are leading the charge in AI research — Google, Facebook, Microsoft and even Yahoo.
Their work in fields such as computer vision, speech recognition and language understanding is sometimes amazing and already resulting in better user experiences. Applied to areas such as physics, medicine, search and rescue, or law enforcement, it could change lives.
But you can cue up the consumer privacy backlash once they turn these technologies toward advertising. These companies don’t need massive, all-knowing, self-learning systems because they already know who we are.
