Elon Musk On When AI Will Surpass Humans
When would you guess that artificial intelligence would be good enough to take over for humans entirely? Basically, when will Skynet become self-aware and take over the human world on Judgment Day? According to Elon Musk, that day could come sooner than expected.
A study performed by Oxford and Yale Universities determined that by the year 2060, A.I. may be able to outperform humans. The study involved surveying 352 of the top A.I. researchers, which predicted:
“Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern life by reshaping transportation, health, science, finance, and the military. To adapt public policy, we need to better anticipate these advances. Here we report the results from a large survey of machine learning researchers on their beliefs about progress in AI. Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053). Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. These results will inform discussion amongst researchers and policymakers about anticipating and managing trends in AI.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, however, had a much shorter timeline in mind:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/871886151014940672
Musk’s prediction is based on the concept that innovation occurs so dramatically that human existence is completely unrecognizable before and after. While he uses robotics heavily in his projects, Musk does warn against an A.I. dominated future, which he thinks would be a dangerous situation.
Musk’s development of Neuralink, which is meant to develop ways to merge the human and machine minds, is meant so that humans can keep pace with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Obviously, this is all a major shot in the dark, as most experts are in no way able to predict the future; therefore none can be completely sure how the A.I./human future will look like.
As Noam Chomsky mentioned, we have hardly begun to fully understand what thought is; it seems like a stretch to already be thinking about replicating it with technology. On that note, however, I never would have thought 10 years ago that we would have self-driving cars, and yet here we are with a bunch of Tesla Model Ss and Xs on the streets. Things move quickly!
SOURCE | Inverse
