
Elon Musk: Humanity Is a Kind of 'Biological Boot Loader' for AI - dsr12
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-humanity-biological-boot-loader-ai/
======
xkcd-sucks
We already have examples of life forms higher up on the food chain, in the
form of cultural institutions like governments, religions, and corporations.
Maybe dealing with an uncaring and differently incentivized AI as an
individual human is similar to dealing with Google or the IRS

------
AndrewKemendo
I think it's worth stating that Musk doesn't argue that Superhuman
intelligence is a few years away or that we even know how to do it - rather,
that it's inevitable eventually.

 _Musk: But even if the rate of technology improvements slowed down by 1,000,
then okay, advanced 1,000 years, or 10,000 years, this is still very tiny._

The average person isn't thinking on the same time scales as Musk, so these
prognostications are kind of waved away.

It's important to understand though that Minky, Turing, Shannon etc... all
believed that in the long run computing machines would eclipse human
capabilities and actively discussed and wrote about that possibility.

It's currently taboo to talk about it though because we all fear overhype and
the next AI winter, also, it's not like we can really work on those issues
right now anyway.

------
Barrin92
as Andrew Ng has pointed out these overly dramatic proclamations really do
more harm than good by distracting people from issues that matter. No AI
system we have is even remotely capable of any sort of high level reasoning
and here we have CEOs going at it again with discussions about the singularity
and that "love" is apparently the answer. AI at the intersection of snake oil
and buddhist retreat.

------
mrosett
The fact that Tesla created truly autonomous vehicles so quickly is a perfect
demonstration of his point. All of his AI predictions so far have come true
[0]; humanity ignores his prophecies at its own peril.

[0]:
[https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1RY0QY](https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1RY0QY)

