Elon Musk on How to Build the Future

Why does Elon continuously talk about AI as if it's taking over the world? At this point, Siri can barely understand me saying the word 'salad'.

Slow down Elon... slow down..

I guess Kurzweil and Elon spend some time on WhatsApp. But since Elon thinks in terms of first principles. He probably has this reasoning:

1. Are the any laws of physics that stop us from creating AI ? Answer is No. Nature already built it so its possible.

2. Is it possible to improve AI significantly ? Yes, because if we can build AI, AI can build better AI.

3. How soon can it happen? Since the trend is exponential. It can happen within 100 years.

4. Is it good idea to start worrying about it now? Sure why not.

FWIW, the Android speech recognition (the default you get when clicking the microphone on home screen) has improved by leaps and bounds in the past 2-3 years. I have a very unusual mixed accent in English and it understands perfectly almost anything I throw at it

Not to mention recent advancements in deep learning / machine learning with neural nets. It seems like that field has really proliferated over the past 5ish years. (I'm not sure what breakthrough specifically has led to all this, but we have TensorFlow, Torch, etc.)

If you've checked out recent papers in machine translation with deep learning, they're about as good as current products with supposedly just a week of unsupervised training. So it's really going places.

Of course, the demos (http://104.131.78.120) fail all the time because they haven't done the work to feed in the whole internet and handle proper names and stuff.

I guess the entire cognitive dissonance com from this line:

> How soon can it happen? Since the trend is exponential. It can happen within 100 years.

Some people think "well, it's likely to happen within 100 years -> it's up to us to be prepared".

Other people think "well, it's unlikely to happen within 10 years -> it's not worth it to begin to prepare".

I don't even know if one of those is wrong!

my theory is that Elon does not truly believe that AI poses an immediate threat but that he needs to spin it that way because people are more open to the idea of augmenting themselves (neural lace) in face of an existential threat, whereas without that it would more likely be spun by the media as being unnatural, "playing god" and all that jazz

I feel that he is right being paranoid, because it is not impossible to build an AI, what his goal is to build an open AI so an AI isn't in the hands of a private organization, who knows what they can do. That being said, it is a long time before we have an actual ASI, but its great that we have the open AI initiative, so the AI itself is built in the open, or squarely in the open.

Not a boy scout then. Always be prepared!