ELON MUSK’S BILLION-DOLLAR CRUSADE TO STOP THE A.I. APOCALYPSE
by Maureen Dowd for Vanity Fair
A French feature editor once told me, "It's obvious that American writers are paid by the word. That's why their features are soooo long." In this very long Vanity Fair article by Maureen Dowd, that seems to be in play. But it is a fascinating and very well researched series of interviews with the major players in the ongoing "Is Artificial Intelligence Safe?" debate.
For example, Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company, to work for safer artificial intelligence says, “There’s no question that the top technologists in Silicon Valley now take A.I. far more seriously—that they do acknowledge it as a risk. I’m not sure that they yet appreciate the significance of the risk.”
 Similarly, Peter Theil says, “Full-on A.I. is on the order of magnitude of extraterrestrials landing. There are some very deeply tricky questions around this . . . . If you really push on how do we make A.I. safe, I don’t think people have any clue. We don’t even know what A.I. is. It’s very hard to know how it would be controllable.”
Meanwhile, Ray Kurzweil of "Singularity" fame says, “The list of things humans can do better than computers is getting smaller and smaller. But we create these tools to extend our long reach.” But also, “the promise and peril are deeply intertwined."
Check out this article to get the full story on the current debate, straight from the heavy-weight actors.
Read the full article at Vanity Fair
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