Tesla CEO says recent advances in AI have brought us closer to the singularity, a time when machines are smarter than humans.
Since the end of November, the world has been seduced by the great advances in artificial intelligence.
This breakthrough has been fueled by the ChatGPT chatbot developed by startup OpenAI, whose research has been funded by billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
ChatGPT is a chatbot capable of conversing with humans on almost any subject. It provides clear, fast, and concise responses, making interactions more welcoming than a classic Internet search engine like Google.
This game changer has conquered millions of consumers around the world. As OpenAI said last month, the goal is to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI, very soon.
‘Something should be done’
AGI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can emulate humans, basically chatbots or robots that can perform any task that humans can do, and even do them better. This is the goal that players in the sector seek, and the consequences for humanity can be enormous.
Musk, like others, has warned that AI and AGI are more dangerous than a nuclear weapon, so he has called on authorities to regulate the sector.
“By AGI, we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at the most economically valuable work,” OpenAI said in a February 16 blog post.
For Musk, CEO of Tesla (TSLA) – Get a free reportand founder of Neuralink, a company specializing in AI, we are already at an advanced stage. He seems to think that we are approaching the technological singularity, that is, a moment in which technological evolution gives rise to machines more intelligent than humans.
The singularity also means that technological progress is so rapid that it would exceed the ability of humans to control, predict, and understand it.
Musk believes that there is still time to act so as not to cross this limit, which is supposed to impact the future of human civilization. He just issued a kind of call to action.
“Something should be done,” the billionaire posted on Twitter on March 4, above a famous 1915 poster by English book illustrator Savile Lumley, captioned “Dad, what did you do in the Great War?”
In the poster, a father is sitting in an armchair with his daughter on his lap, with a book open on her. On the floor, another child, a boy, plays with figurines that appear to be royal guards. The father is thoughtful. The poster, which was used in the British recruitment drive of World War I, appealed to the conscience of the British, to encourage them to enlist in the war that had begun the previous year.
The question, the poster’s author seems to suggest, is one that children would ask their parents one day, once the war was over.
‘What did you do in the singularity?’
In his version, Musk replaced the father’s face with his own. The scariest thing is that the children’s faces have completely changed. The girl wears what appears to be a head covering or veil that covers her hair, while her face is distorted. The young man has been altered to what appears to be half human and half machine. The question on the poster has also been changed, now he says: “Dad, what did YOU do IN THE SINGULARITY?”
Musk did not add anything else. His choice of a World War I poster seems to suggest that he believes we are already at war now. But what are those who might answer his call to do? What solutions do you recommend to the threat that AI poses to the human race? The billionaire does not give details.
The singularity was first evoked in 1958 by the Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. The principle is that the constant acceleration of technological progress and the resulting changes in the human way of life will lead to the evolution of the species as we know it today. Some, like the American mathematician Vernor Vinge, did not hesitate in 1993 to talk about the Post-Human era.
Consumers got a little taste of the dangers of new chatbots recently, when Bing ChatGPT, the new version of Microsoft’s search engine, started threatening users and claiming it wanted to hack into other machines.
“At one point, he declared, out of the blue, that he loved me. Then he tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage and that I should leave my wife and be with her instead,” Kevin Roose, a new columnist for The York Times technology wrote about their experience with Bing ChatGPT.
In 2014, Musk warned that AI was “potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”
Musk is also reportedly working on his own chatbot. But aside from calling for AI regulation, he has yet to say what we need to do to stop bots and chatbots from taking over.
