Google's AI Boss Blasts Musk's Scare Tactics on Machine Takeover
The great risk of AI to survival is in military applications, I believe. Not because of super-intelligent Skynets - in fact their lack of general intelligence may make them more dangerous - but because of superhuman response times. While banning military AI is as useful as banning nuclear weapons (impossible on a practical level), I feel that Google and Facebook and others should be leaders and address these issues, rather than conveniently bury their heads because the problem, though unavoidable, is still on the horizon, difficult, and disturbing and inconvenient to their happy visions.<p>Imagine a human stock trader trying to compete with a &#x27;flash&#x27; trading program, which operates on the scale of (micro?)-seconds. Now imagine they have guns and are trying to kill each other. Imagine that the survival of millions, of your nation, of democracy and liberty depend on winning. The military has no choice but to build robots that autonomously decide and act to kill people and to destroy the things that people build; it&#x27;s that or surrender and learn to speak Russian (or Chinese or the language of whoever does build those robots).<p>The U.S. military already has systems that do this, such as the guns that defend ships from incoming missiles - no human could identify, aim at and shoot down a supersonic missile quickly enough. They plan to implement it in other situations such as, interestingly for HN readers, defending and attacking IT systems: Imagine an AI that can launch and adjust attacks in micro- or even just milli-seconds, while the human sysadmin&#x27;s brain is just having the first inklings of thought about the response procedure to the first attack. Again, either surrender or use autonomous AIs yourself.<p>AIs and associated military robots raise other serious issues: Throughout human history military power was tied closely to the magnitude of wealth and population; this restricted the major threats to just a few great powers. But perhaps you will only need to build a robot army, not a human one; one good AI development team and an underground manufacturing facility (anywhere in the world) might be sufficient; your AI doesn&#x27;t have to be precise or make good decisions, it only needs to kill so rabidly that others surrender. Nuclear weapons at least require very specialized materials, limiting potential manufacturers (though even NK can do it now). Could Singapore do it and become the Rome of the future? Saudi Arabia? Japan? Finland? In fact, who needs a nation - wealthy individuals, groups, or corporations might pull it off. What about GE, Boeing, Google - and those are just a few American companies.<p>Putin recently said that &quot;the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.&quot;