Elon Musk is wrong about artificial intelligence
Is there anyone who isn’t a fan of Elon Musk? His competitors, obviously, do not deify him as many others do but then very few are able to compete with him. Musk does and plans to do the most outrageous things: settle down on Mars, create a solar-powered battery to generate electricity, travel from New York to Washington DC in 29 minutes.
All of this would range between being excessively bold and straight-out improbable. But if the scale and ambition of all of this does not impress you, what will?
Musk, in many ways, is also a study in contradiction. In most of his interviews, he would paint a shockingly positive picture of what all can be achieved through innovation while in many others he would appear to sound arrogantly apocalyptic about the dangers of innovation. The latter is what happened in a recent tete-a-tete with many US governors. Musk channelled his inner human-like fragility and frankly spoke about the “fears and the fundamental risk that Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to our civilisation”. He compared AI to “summoning the demon” and demanded that “governments need to start regulating AI now”.
Sure, as Musk states that he has “exposure to very cutting edge AI and that people should be concerned about it”, this set of policy recommendations poses a real dilemma for many in the government.
Governments often catch up with innovation and then try to over-enthusiastically regulate it, often harming the sector that they hoped would do well after regulation. This situation is the exact opposite – the government trying to regulate something that is still under-development.
What makes Elon Musk think that the results will be any different in this scenario?
“Pro-actively” regulating AI will also end up hurting innovation and negating any benefits that may come out of such technology. Elon Musk may more informed about AI than anyone else but to ask for regulation at this point could be a case of over-estimating long-term dangers while ignoring the short-term gains (of which there are many: driverless cars, body trackers, universal translators, smarter news feeds).
Why is Musk – this generation’s Steve Jobs – oblivious to the good that may come from AI?
He seems to be wrongly conflating AI with a “super-intelligent entity that we see in sci-fi movies” – something that “many in the science community doubt that will ever happen, especially in our lifetime”. As pointed out by Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of the Wired Magazine and the author of the bestseller The Inevitable, “the AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services – cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything. It will transform the internet, the global economy and the civilisation.”
AI, according to Kelly, will not just help us become “better chess players, but also better pilots, better doctors, better judges and better teachers”. Then, why is Elon Musk, the co-founder of the OpenAI project, losing sleep over the threats by AI?
The answer lies in what Kelly describes as a big concern over who will control the AI systems we use. He cautions that the “AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large general-purpose cloud based commercial intelligences”.
Separately, in a 2015 report, Shivon Zilis, a venture capitalist at Bloomberg Data, listed out “2,529 artificial intelligence, machine learning and data related startups”. Zilis notes, “over 10 per cent of these non-public companies in this AI landscape have been acquired and Google is the number one acquirer”.
It is not hard to guess but regulating AI at this juncture will not only discourage many from starting companies but also help bigger players such as Musk (or Google) to gain further hold over the AI landscape.
Musk is a shrewd businessman but he would be the first to acknowledge that our civilisation has progressed because of innovation, not regulation.
Artificial Intelligence, in a way, is the new net neutrality. It isn’t about protecting us from super intelligent robots or saving the internet from mega-rich self-interested corporates.
It’s about protecting your own turf. The extent of impact of the “fear of the unknown” on public policy all over the world is well-documented. Let’s not make AI another casualty.
At this stage, we need more innovation – not well-intentioned government regulation.