For this reason, Musk, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, and many other tech experts who share this concern, are calling for a pause in advances toward superhuman capabilities for six months or more until society can better understand and head off the risks.
Elon is very serious about this danger … enough so that in 2018 he walked away from continuing an early major investment in super intelligent capabilities as a co-founder of OpenAI largely controlled by Microsoft because it disregarded his concerns.
Microsoft has since developed ChatGPT which I addressed in two previous articles.
Musk also discussed his deep concerns regarding AI safety with Google co-founder Larry Page, a close tech friend who, he said, “really seemed to want superintelligence, basically digital god, as soon as possible.”
Page, as Musk noted, had made many public statements over the years that Google’s goal is to usher in artificial general intelligence, a human-like cognitively thinking self-awareness.
Page allegedly called Musk a “specist” for being too pro-human in his outlook.
As Musk recounted the conversation: “That was the last straw. At the time, Google had acquired Deep Mind, and Deep Mind had about three-quarters of the AI talent in the world. They obviously had a tremendous amount of money and more computers than anyone else. So, I’m like, we’re in a unipolar world here.”
Musk told Tucker, “We want pro-human … Make the future good for the humans because we’re humans.”
What can go so terribly wrong as to represent a grave public danger to and prospective threat to our entire human society?
For starters, we really don’t fully know.
Musk refers here to a “singularity,” a point at which AI surpasses human intelligence and becomes impossible to predict. It’s “like a black hole, because you don’t know what happens after that.”
At one end of the scale, Musk observes, “AI is perhaps more dangerous than say, mismanaged aircraft design, or production maintenance, or bad car production, in that it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it’s nontrivial,” and at the other “has the potential of civilization destruction.”
And since we don’t know what can go wrong, we had better put some regulatory oversight safeguards in place before we discover it’s too late and AI has taken control over decisions by and for people.
“That’s definitely where things are headed,” Musk warns.
Musk observes that AI is already being politically weaponized by Silicon Valley tech giants of liberal persuasion, as evidenced by Microsoft-aligned ChatGPT and Google-owned DeepMind.
As discussed in a 2020 Forbes article titled “How Artificial Intelligence Swayed the Midterm Elections,” Democrats used AI to target fundraising campaigns at likely donors, allowing them to massively outspend Republicans in close races and deliver positive results for the Democratic Party.
A March 22 open letter signed by Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and about 50,000 others so far, called for an immediate halt to the development of general artificial intelligence systems that can evolve beyond carrying out specific tasks and theoretically surpass human intelligence.
The letter stated that “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” and that “advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth.”
To counteract this bias, Musk said that he's planning to build an AI he calls TruthGPT, "a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe."
He told Carlson, “I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”
Or perhaps supersmart AI will want us around in order to keep its digital lifeblood of electrical power on.
Should that be the case, maybe they will super-logically just target Democrats for extinction and peacefully coexist with the rest of us who share that fossil-fueled energy priority.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.