Who wrote the lines of poetry "quoted" by Lincoln at the Soldiers' Home?

[David Lockmiller]

A directly relevant story on AI appeared today on the New York Times online, after I made my previous posting, that is partially titled: "The Feud Over Killer Robots"

Mark Zuckerberg thought his fellow Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk was behaving like an alarmist.

Mr. Musk, the entrepreneur behind SpaceX and the electric-car maker Tesla, had taken it upon himself to warn the world that artificial intelligence was “potentially more dangerous than nukes” in television interviews and on social media.

So, on Nov. 19, 2014, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, invited Mr. Musk to dinner at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. Two top researchers from Facebook’s new artificial intelligence lab and two other Facebook executives joined them.

As they ate, the Facebook contingent tried to convince Mr. Musk that he was wrong. But he wasn’t budging. “I genuinely believe this is dangerous,” Mr. Musk told the table, according to one of the dinner’s attendees, Yann LeCun, the researcher who led Facebook’s A.I. lab.

Mr. Musk’s fears of A.I., distilled to their essence, were simple: If we create machines that are smarter than humans, they could turn against us. (See: “The Terminator,” “The Matrix,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Let’s for once, he was saying to the rest of the tech industry, consider the unintended consequences of what we are creating before we unleash it on the world.

Neither Mr. Musk nor Mr. Zuckerberg would talk in detail about the dinner, which has not been reported before, or their long-running A.I. debate.

The creation of “superintelligence” — the name for the supersmart technological breakthrough that takes A.I. to the next level and creates machines that not only perform narrow tasks that typically require human intelligence (like self-driving cars) but can actually outthink humans — still feels like science fiction. But the fight over the future of A.I. has spread across the tech industry.

More than 4,000 Google employees recently signed a petition protesting a $9 million A.I. contract the company had signed with the Pentagon — a deal worth chicken feed to the internet giant, but deeply troubling to many artificial intelligence researchers at the company. Last week, Google executives, trying to head off a worker rebellion, said they wouldn’t renew the contract when it expires next year.

Artificial intelligence research has enormous potential and enormous implications, both as an economic engine and a source of military superiority. The Chinese government has said it is willing to spend billions in the coming years to make the country the world’s leader in A.I., while the Pentagon is aggressively courting the tech industry for help. A new breed of autonomous weapons can’t be far away. . . .

Even such influential figures as the Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the late Stephen Hawking have expressed concern about creating machines that are more intelligent than we are. Even though superintelligence seems decades away, they and others have said, shouldn’t we consider the consequences before it’s too late?

On Jan. 27, 2016, Google’s DeepMind lab unveiled a machine that could beat a professional player at the ancient board game Go. In a match played a few months earlier, the machine, called AlphaGo, had defeated the European champion Fan Hui — five games to none.

Even top A.I. researchers had assumed it would be another decade before a machine could solve the game. Go is complex — there are more possible board positions than atoms in the universe — and the best players win not with sheer calculation, but through intuition. Two weeks before AlphaGo was revealed, Mr. LeCun said the existence of such a machine was unlikely.



The Chinese government has said it is willing to spend billions in the coming years to make the country the world’s leader in A.I. It is, therefore, unreasonable to believe that the Chinese would not spend billions in the coming years for “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people” and “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms of human rights.”

As President Lincoln said to skeptics in regards to the development of ironclads: "We must not let the rebels get ahead of us in such an important matter."

History is filled with stories of advanced weaponry defeating established civilizations. The African slave trade and the subjugation of native American Indians being only two examples.

Collectively speaking, merely "putting our heads in the sand" is not a viable option.