Elon Musk, Artificial Intelligence and You

Autonomous killer robots, an immortal AI dictator, the question of consciousness, and what it means to be human

Coming soon to a street near you?

Elon Musk’s documentary Do You Trust This Computer is well worth watching; it was free to stream over this weekend. I can’t say that the majority of the ideas put forward were new to me, there was however one idea, right at the end, that I must admit I had not considered before.

If you have not watched the documentary, here is my recollection of the main points, this is not verbatim as I was not taking notes as I watched it. My own observations are preceded by [HJ] to distinguish my thoughts from what the documentary presented.

• Technological development can occur a lot faster than we imagine it might.
• Advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”) are coming fast, we might only be a few steps away from creating a self-aware, self-learning AI.
• AI has already advanced to such a stage as to render many human tasks and jobs redundant. Jobs such as drivers, data entry clerks, business analysts, even medical specialists — all these jobs (and probably most jobs eventually) are at risk of complete displacement by AI and robots.
• Once AI learns something, e.g. the game of GO…