Elon Musk Calls for Research to Make Sure Artificial Intelligence Doesnt Kill Us All

UPDATED BELOW

For Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, figuring out how to avoid the potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence is just as if not more important than advancing it.

Musk, who has been warning us about the possible dangers of AI for some time now, is once again calling for more research into AI safety. Musk has signed and is promoting an open letter from the Future of Life Institute that calls for research not only on making AI more capable, but also on maximizing the societal benefit

The adoption of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations and statistical learning methods has led to a large degree of integration and cross-fertilization among AI, machine learning, statistics, control theory, neuroscience, and other fields. The establishment of shared theoretical frameworks, combined with the availability of data and processing power, has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems, says the letter.

There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.

The Future of Life Institute is a a volunteer-run research and outreach organization working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity. The groups current focus is on potential risks from the development of human-level artificial intelligence.

You may be unfamiliar with this specific interest of Musks, but the billionaire has been rather outspoken about it especially in the last year or so. In June of last year, Musk pretty much admitted to investing in an up-and-coming AI company to keep an eye on them.

Yeah. I mean, I dont think in the movie Terminator, they didnt create A.I. to they didnt expect, you know some sort of Terminator-like outcome. It is sort of like the Monty Python thing: Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition. Its just you know, but you have to be careful, he said.

Soon after, he tweeted that AI was potentially more dangerous than nukes.

Then, a few months later, Musk had this to say as a reply to an article on a futurology site: