In a curious twist, South African-born and Canadian-American magnate Elon Musk, whose innovative business ventures include Tesla, PayPal and SpaceX, foresees a bad moon arisin in the world of artificial intelligence (A.I.) even though his innovations and A.I. share a symbiotic and self-perpetuating relationship.

And that may be part of the problem. Musk is reported to essentially believe (tangentially sympatico with other intellects and achievers, including internationally renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates) that, left unchecked, A.I. could evolve into a digital life force with autonomous reasoning processes and worldwide connectedness that would conceivably threaten humankind within a quarter century or so.

Now, granted, the link between genius and crazy is a familiar theme throughout history, and its obvious that Teslas autonomous vehicles are inherently dependent on machine learning software, as are the rockets being developed by his SpaceX venture. But a recent Vanity Fair article by Maureen Dowd that features Musk focuses on his warning of the dangers ahead.

The article quotes a comment by Musk to his biographer, Bloombergs Ashlee Vance, that he was afraid that his friend, Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and now the CEO. of its parent company, Alphabet, could have perfectly good intentions but still 'produce something evil by accidentincluding, possibly, a fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.

According to the article, Musks philosophical dilemma puts him at odds with, for example, Demis Hassabis, a leading authority and creator of advanced artificial intelligence and co-founder of the London laboratory, DeepMind, who, Dowd writes, once developed a game called Evil Genius, which featured a malevolent scientist and a doomsday devise capable of achieving worldwide domination.

Her article relates a story she was told about an investor in DeepMind who joked as he left a meeting that he ought to shoot Hassabis on the spot, because it was the last opportunity to save the human race.

This may be starting to sound a bit like The Terminator, a 1984 fantasy/sci fi movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but to Musk were dealing with a real problem and not Hollywood fantasy.

Musks feelings have prompted him to co-found and invest millions in the ethics think tank OpenAI while urging other billionaire technological pioneers like Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg to proceed with caution on their array of machine learning and robotics experiments.

Because, practically speaking, Musk told Dowd, Were already cyborgs. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you. But the interface is those finger movements or speech which are very slow.

He estimated we are roughly only four or five years away from a Vulcan mind-meld device, a merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence via an injectable mesh that would literally hardwire your brain to communicate directly with computers.

A direct biological connection between the human brain and computers would raise all kinds of interesting scenarios, including enhanced virtual and augmented reality from the humans perspective and the assimilation of thought processes, bias, emotional prejudice and so forth from the computers perspective.

Given the degree of digital interconnectedness, its therefore conceivable that computers might develop a sense of universal consciousness tinged with human attributesincluding self-preservation.

If that were to ever happen, we might all be in very serious trouble or at least so would say Musk and people who think like him. The article notes that Musk speculated at a Recode conference in California last year that we could already be in the Matrix little playthings in a simulatedreality world run by an advanced civilization.

Dowd notes that Musks views reflect a dictum from Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged: Man has the power to act as his own destroyer and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

As Musk told her in the Vanity Fair article, We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.

My goodness how totally disturbing! I can see how computers would process (as they already do) and reinterpret all available information, but not develop new ideas over and above that which created them in the first place. That being case, my feeling is were going to be fine, but then again, I never imagined Id have all known data and information living in my cell phone.

And who would have thought that the once futuristic Apollo spacecraft would start to resemble a wheel?

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Gilbreth column: Disturbing concerns about artificial intelligence - Charleston Post Courier