The head of artificial intelligence at Google’s DeepMind thinks we’re all being silly to worry about machines rising up to crush humanity. (Or maybe he’s just a superintelligent machine sent from the future to lull us into a false sense of security.)
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought last year, told a London audience Friday that critics and worrywarts have it all wrong.
“Whether it’s Terminator coming to blow us up or mad scientists looking to create quite perverted women robots, this narrative has somehow managed to dominate the entire landscape, which we find really quite remarkable,” Suleyman said, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
It’s not just conspiracy-theory crackpots and “Terminator” fans who are wary — Tesla’s Elon Musk has called artificial intelligence “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” and Stephen Hawking warned A.I. could “spell the end of the human race.”
But Suleyman says we’re looking at it from the wrong perspective.
“The way we think about A.I. is that it’s going to be a hugely powerful tool that we control and that we direct, whose capabilities we limit, just as you do with any other tool that we have in the world around us, whether they’re washing machines or tractors. We’re building them to empower humanity and not to destroy us.”
So relax, humanity. It’s not like we’re making intelligent machines built to kill humans.
(Um. . . yet.)
At top: Arnold Schwarzenegger attends a press event for “Terminator Genisys” on June 1, 2015 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Raphael Dias/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures International)
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