Elite transhumanist Bill Gates has weighed in on the ongoing debate over the wisdom of rolling out AI at a mass scale, given how little we know of the ramifications.
Unsurprisingly, given his full-throated embrace of Moderna’s experimental mRNA injections marketed as vaccines (in which his “nonprofit” foundation quietly invested tens of millions of dollars), Gates is not in favor of due diligence regarding AI either.
Via Fortune:
Founder turned-philanthropist Bill Gates has poured cold water on a proposal to ban the development of powerful A.I. for six months in order to get better planning and management parameters in place.
Last week, Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk; Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; Emad Mostaque, the founder and CEO of Stability AI; and more than 1,100 other high-profile technologists and artificial intelligence researchers signed an open letter calling for a pause in A.I. development…
“I don’t think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges,” Gates told Reuters Monday. “Clearly there’s huge benefits to these things…what we need to do is identify the tricky areas.”
The above-referenced letter, signed by the likes of Musk and Steve Wozniak, reads as follows:
AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs. As stated in the widely-endorsed Asilomar AI Principles, Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.
If we’ve learned anything from the ongoing COVID-19 origin debate, it’s that reckless experimentation with no supervision from the public (even when the public is funding the research in question) is a recipe for disaster. In the context of COVID-19, that meant the birth of a viral pandemic of the scale not seen for a hundred years. In the context of AI, it means the complete overhaul of the economy, the dislocation of perhaps the majority of human labor, and profound cultural shifts driven by artificial intelligence.
Are fears over AI overblown, or not worth addressing, as Gates seems to believe? Maybe so — but, then again, to hear one machine learning researcher tell it, maybe not.
Via Futurism (emphases added):
One of the world’s loudest artificial intelligence critics has issued a stark call to not only put a pause on AI but to militantly put an end to it — before it ends us instead…
Machine learning researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has for more than two decades been warning about the dystopian future that will come when we achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is once again ringing the alarm bells.
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