WILL ROBOTS DESTROY US?
Two of the world’s richest men are locked in a bitter feud. Facebook’s boss says Artificial Intelligence will enrich mankind. PayPal’s founder believes it will either enslave us or kill us
SILICON VALLEY is quaking. Two of the technology world’s biggest beasts are at war over the future of mankind, disagreeing fundamentally about whether humans will one day be taken over by robots and even exterminated from our planet.
On one side of the argument is Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook.
On the other is Elon Musk, inventor of internet pay system PayPal, creator of Tesla electric cars and the pioneer behind an initiative to bring (relatively) cheap space travel to the masses.
Both have earned billions of dollars from the digital revolution, but hold diametrically opposed views on where it’s leading.
At the centre of their dispute is so- called Artificial Intelligence (AI) — the term which describes the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.
These tasks include skills such as visual perception, speech recognition and translation between languages.
The application of AI — dubbed the ‘march of the machines’ — is already entrenched in our daily lives, be it on mobile phones or Amazon’s ‘virtual home assistant’ Alexa (which can respond to verbal commands), battlefield robots, delivery drones and driverless cars. And that’s just the start. For AI has the potential to do so much more, from automating jobs that once required human input and decision-making to helping doctors spot cancer at its earliest stages by photographs and scans.
However, Musk and many of the world’s most respected scientists and computer engineers — including brilliant British minds such as Professor Stephen Hawking and Lord Rees, the former president of the Royal Society — believe there may be a terrible price to pay if we let machines think for us.
They fear a digital- led Armageddon in which super- intelligent computers soon out-think humans.
Science fiction could become science fact when machines that have no concept of human values autonomously decide that our presence is a barrier to their own development and that human beings should be got rid of.
Musk has, for some time now, warned against this so-called ‘Robocalypse’. On the other hand, Zuckerberg, has loudly proclaimed his zealous belief in the power and reliability of AI.
In recent years, with the availability of ever more powerful computer hardware and microchips, tech companies have invested billions in AI development.
This has led to what is known as ‘deep learning’, a process by which computer systems ‘teach’ themselves by crunching vast amounts of data available online, rather than having to be guided by a human.
As a result, computers are thinking independently more and more like a human brain.
Such technology is already being used by internet search engines to detect spam emails and credit card fraud, to recognise voice commands spoken into phones and to activate online bank accounts. NOW
there is a growing division of opinion about whether the dawn of intelligent machines is a blessing for us — or a curse.
So this week, when the pair’s disagreement took on a more personal edge, the wider world took notice. It started last Sunday, after Zuckerberg, the world’s fifth richest person, rebuked what he called ‘naysayers’ who drum up ‘doomsday scenarios’ about AI.
Speaking in a live online broadcast from his garden in California as he cooked a barbecue, he was asked about Musk’s views following his recently warning to U.S. state governors that AI ‘poses a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation’ and must be regulated. Zuckerberg replied: ‘It’s really negative, and in some ways, I think it is pretty irresponsible.’
He went on to say he was an ‘optimist’, adding: ‘In the next five to ten years, AI is going to deliver so many improvements in the quality of our lives . . . if you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents and you’re arguing against being better able to diagnose people when they are sick.’
Musk hit back on Twitter. ‘I’ve talked to Mark [Zuckerberg] about this. His understanding of the subject is limited,’ he said witheringly.
Zuckerberg leapt back onto Facebook to defend himself, flagging up a study by his own research team to justify AI’s potential ‘ to make the world better’. This row, between a pair of tech wizards who couldn’t be more different, is likely to run and run.
Zuckerberg, aged 33 but who still looks and sometimes behaves like the socially awkward Harvard under-graduate he once was, has turned Facebook into one of the world’s most powerful media businesses, connecting two billion people — and the numbers are increasing by the second.
His reputation as a supremely calculating and power-hungry businessman was memorably cemented in the film, The Social Network.
It told the story of the founding of the website and the bitter battle for ownership that followed, with accusations of betrayal and multi-million dollar lawsuits.
Zuckerberg emerged triumphant and has accumulated a fortune estimated at more than $63 billion.
In recent years, Facebook has been mired in scandals, including allegations that users’ personal information has been sold to advertisers and that it has avoided billions in taxes by routing its business through low-tax Ireland.
During the 2016 U. S. presidential election, Hillary
Clinton alleged that Facebook had been used to spread fake news about her.
With his doctor wife, Priscilla Chan, and young daughter, Max, he lives a relatively unostentatious life.
Evidence of his faith in AI is the family ‘ butler’ Jarvis, a home intelligence system that Zuckerberg spent 100 hours building last year (persuading the Hollywood star Morgan Freeman to provide its voice). ZUCkERBERG
communicates with Jarvis through text or voice commands. He can ask it to perform services such as adjusting the lights, changing the music, making toast, recognising callers at the gate and letting them in, or waking up his daughter with Mandarin Chinese lessons.
Currently, there is a widespread belief that Zuckerberg’s long-term ambition is to run as a Democratic presidential candidate.
For his part, Elon Musk, currently squiring actor Johnny Depp’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, is a more abrasive personality but at least one feels he has a pulse. The 46-year- old South African-born workaholic — reportedly worth more than $16 billion — made his first fortune by developing PayPal,
went on to found Tesla and now, with SpaceX, wants to one day colonise Mars.
His ideas — some more feasible than others — and his willingness to pursue them — have earned him a reputation as a tech baron who, unlike many of his peers, at least wants to spend his billions achieving something useful. For example, SpaceX is developing reusable rockets to cut the cost of space travel, while his tunnel company is working on a 760mph underground, electro-magnetic railway system called the Hyperloop aimed at ending traffic jams and car commuting.
With Tesla cars, he has been among the pioneers of the electric car revolution. And the British government’s announcement this week — wildly ambitious though it might be — that non-electric new cars will be banned from the UK’s roads after 2040 has given the battery car industry a big boost.
Musk is also preparing for a
future world where, he fears, super- intelligent machines might move to subjugate the human population.
His latest venture is Neuralink, a way of merging human brains with computers by implanting tiny electrodes. These would massively increase people’s cognitive power, he believes, and so might at least put humanity more on a par with AI. AS
We have seen, Musk, who was the inspiration for a technology- obsessed superhero, Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr) in the Iron Man films, doesn’t mince his words as he addresses this huge challenge.
He speaks of AI being mankind’s ‘ biggest existential threat’ and likens people’s willingness to encourage its development to ‘ summoning the demon’. His concern is shared by respected figures, such as Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher.
In a brilliant, theoretical illustration of the problem, he has outlined how a super- intelligent machine which has been programmed to make paperclips could keep re- designing itself to become ever more intelligent and ever more efficient in creating paperclips. Before long, it could turn huge areas of the earth into paperclip factories.
Aware that a human could switch it off, threatening the endless
paperclip supply and therefore the reason for its existence, the machine could decide that humans had to be exterminated.
Chillingly, Bostrom goes on to question if human civilisation could survive no matter what goal you gave a super-intelligent machine. His conclusion? We’d need to be very, careful what we ask them to do.
Significantly, the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, have signed an open letter calling for urgent research to ensure that machine intelligence is ‘robust and beneficial’.
Professor Hawking went further, warning that full AI ‘could spell the end of the human race’. He, too, predicts it would ‘take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate’ and humans, ‘who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded’.
even those Silicon Valley tycoons — who stand to make many billions from AI — include plenty of sceptics.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the most successful tech pioneer of all, is fearful.
Two years ago, he predicted the human-robot relationship would start happily, but then turn ugly.
‘The machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super-intelligent,’ he said and then, he argued, their intelligence would become dangerously advanced.
‘I agree with elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why [ other] people are not concerned.’ LAST
week, Dick Costolo, former chief executive of Twitter, also spoke out in support of those who are worried about the future.
‘If you hypothesise that we could create intelligence greater than ours, it’s pretty easy to jump from there to think that intelligence would be able to figure its way out of any sort of logical box you try to put it in,’ he said.
‘If it escapes from the box, then what do you do?’
Of course, it would be unfair to suggest the tech world is completely ignoring the threat of ‘Robocalypse’.
One leading tech research company is calling for a ‘big red button’ to be installed on every AI system to switch it off if the machine ignores human commands to power down and goes rogue.
But even if we don’t end up in a world where machines are trying to rub us out, they’re almost certainly going to take many jobs.
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of england, has warned that over the next few decades, automation could take over 15 million British jobs — more than half the workforce. Any job that involves some degree of routine tasks is at risk, meaning that many white collar professionals would be just as vulnerable as manual workers.
Meanwhile, in a riposte to the prophets of doom, Silicon Valley optimists point out that our ancestors made similar apocalyptic predictions when the steam engine was invented.
But there is one crucial difference — AI isn’t just offering to do our physical work for us, it’s also threatening to think for us.
Time will tell whether our greatgrandchildren will still have a place on this planet or if it will be ruled by robots telling them their fate is the same as the dinosaurs.