Dammit, Elon!
Have you learned nothing — literally nothing — for the great science fiction movies of the past? It’s almost as if Elon Musk is actually an android himself, secretly pushing artificial intelligence to the singularity — that’s how reckless his behavior can be.
Sure, he’s actually quite open and vocal about the dangers of AI and singularity, but actions are far louder than words, and Elon’s actions are at the forefront of AI.
For the uninitiated, singularity is the theory that one day — without any warning — AI will trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.
I know people are always using The Terminator in their robot references, but the idea of singularity can best be explained by those movies: what if SkyNet realizes it doesn’t need us anymore and decides to make a move?
And that’s essentially the future we’re headed towards thanks to the likes of Elon Musk, whose artificial intelligence company OpenAI recently announced that they will not be releasing their latest AI model out of fear of how it will be used, according to Wired.
In a statement, Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director, said that while they’re “not at a stage yet where we’re saying, this is a danger”, he did admit that OpenAI has concerns about how the technology would be used.
The technology, which was developed by OpenAI, is “large-scale unsupervised language model” that has the ability to generate news stories from just a headline.
However, it appears as that technology will never see the light of day, at least publicly.
“Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with,” Amodei said.
While this instance may not be overly threatening in a vacuum, it is part of a larger pattern of decisions that seems to be pushing mankind closer and closer to artificial intelligence without fully understanding the consequences.
In fact, Musk himself has said that AI has the potential to create “an immortal dictator from which we would never escape” … but maybe that’s exactly what a robot working on the inside would say.
We’re watching you, Elon.
You can read more about OpenAI’s new AI text generator and why it’s “too dangerous” to be released to the public over at Wired.
What did you think of this story? Is artificial intelligence mistake, or the way of the future? Should greater regulations be put in place for AI, and should Elon and others be held responsible for incidents such as this one? Let us know in the comments!
