
Elon Musk says AI could lead to third world war - owens99
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/04/elon-musk-ai-third-world-war-vladimir-putin
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hodgesrm
Does anybody else find Musk's concerns about AI wildly overblown? Just to pick
one example, does anyone _really_ believe that autonomous weapons--most of
which have yet to be developed--will be more dangerous than nuclear weapons
are now?

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GhostVII
I think that "AI" weapons can definitely be more dangerous if they can
determine the difference between civilians and enemy soldiers. Imagine if
there was an AI weapon which you could use without on a massive scale without
worrying about civilian casualties, I would consider it much more dangerous
because people would be more willing to use it than nukes. But in general I
agree that, since the world is very safe right now even though we have nukes,
AI weapons probably won't be the difference that gets us WW III.

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hodgesrm
That's how things work already without any artificial intelligence whatsoever.
The US calculates risk of collateral damage for air strikes and has been quite
willing to use them as well when the risk is low. They have done this for
decades.

Also, it's hard to argue that the world is "very safe" with nukes. All one can
say is they have not been used recently. That's unlikely to last forever--or
even much longer--the way things are going. The US and USSR barely avoided
using them [0] and some of the current owners are a lot less stable.

[0] See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83)
for one example.

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walterstucco
I've seen this movie!

It's called "Colossus, the Forbyn project"

Highly recommended

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jlebrech
if an AI figures out sending out an ICBM is the best solution it's more likely
to use it than a human.

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mvindahl
But the same could be said of any snippet of bug-ridden computer code if we
let computers run our ICBMs (and to some extent we do). Doing really stupid
and self-destructive stuff doesn't require a lot of intelligence. Doing semi-
random stuff, well .. a lot of code that I write seems to behave that way
until I get it somewhat debugged.

