Bill Gates and Elon Musk Discuss Superintelligence and More with Baidu's CEO Robin Li

 Superintelligence  

Baidu CEO and chairman Robin Li interviewed Bill Gates and Elon Musk at the Boao Forum, last month. The discussion ranged from entrepreneurship to philanthropy, from "summoning the demon" of artificial intelligence to the pros and cons of technocratic government, to automated driving, and more.

In the session, "Dialogue: Technology & Innovation for a Sustainable Future" during the 2015 Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Boao, China, last month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk were jointly interviewed by Baidu CEO Robin Li.

In the video above, (it is not the greatest quality, but content-wise is very good), Gates and Musk each discuss some of their early challenges in creating their companies and gaining incredible wealth.

When asked how he manages his multiple companies, Musk replies, "I wouldn't really recommend this.  It's not good for quality of life."

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In term of artificial intelligence, Gates stated that he would highly recommend Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. During the interview Gates echoed Musk’s concerns with future superintelligence safety, with Musk noting that a good analogy would be “if you consider nuclear research, with its potential for a very dangerous weapon: releasing the energy is easy; containing that energy safely is very difficult. And so I think the right emphasis for AI research is on AI safety.”

"We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence."

"We have a general purpose learning algorithm, that evolution has endowed us with," comments Gates. "It's running in an extremely slow computer," he states while pointing at his own head. "It has very limited memory size, [no] ability to send data to other computers—we have to use this funny mouth thing here, whenever we build a new one, it starts over, it doesn't know how to walk...."

"As soon as this algorithm—of taking experience and turning it into knowledge—which is so amazing, and we have not done in software—as soon as you do that, it's not clear you'll even know when you're just at the human level," he continues. "You'll be at the superhuman level almost as soon as that algorithm is implanted in silicon."

As Watson demonstrated, such an intelligence can then go forward and read all the content of the internet.  "We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence." Gates wonders how other people cannot see this as a huge challenge for humanity in the not-to-distant future.


SOURCE  Adam Ford

By 33rd Square

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