Elon Musk, who made headlines in December by likening research in artificial intelligence to “summoning the demon”, has backed his play with hard cash, donating $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to fund research that could reorient the industry towards the improvement of human life, which is now only one of its many goals. Stephen Hawking had endorsed Musk’s fears, pointing out that since humans would evolve much slower than autonomous machines, they would become history in a Darwinian holocaust.
The market for expert systems, standalone intelligences and machines which use data in unprecedented quantities and possibly unforeseen ways is expected to explode into a new industry segment. A few days ago Musk, along with Hawking, also led a signature campaign among AI specialists which calls for giving direction to the technology. Instead, the industry has been focused on how AI can be monetised. The fear is that the technology is being made ready to market before its human implications are completely understood. Also, safety has been in question since Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics. Can an autonomous entity loosed into the wild be recalled for a programming error, like automobile manufacturers do when they detect a design flaw?
