Elon Musk on artificial intelligence: If you're not concerned you should be

• Updated on: 2019-05-02
• Read original article here

People are far more likely to be killed by artificial intelligence than nuclear war with North Korea, warns Elon Musk
Mr Musk has spoken out about the potential dangers of AI on numerous occasions / Getty/iStock
'If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be'
Monday 14 August 2017 11:59 BST
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The Independent Tech
Elon Musk says artificial intelligence poses more of a “risk” than a potential nuclear conflict between the US and North Korea .
The CEO of Tesla issued the warning after an AI built by OpenAI , a company founded by Mr Musk, defeated the world’s best Dota 2 players after just two weeks of training.
“If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea,” he tweeted shortly after the bot’s victory, along with a picture of a poster bearing the slogan: “In the end, the machines will win”.
The poster, incidentally, is actually about gambling.
11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed
11 useful Facebook features you didn't know existed
1/11 Clean up your News Feed
Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easiest option is to head to the column on the left and open News Feed Preferences. From here, you can prioritise friends, unfollow friends, refollow friends you unfollowed in the past and even block specific apps.
2/11 Change ad preferences
You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. Just open Settings and select Advert Preferences.
3/11 Manage notifications
You can get notifications about pretty much anything on Facebook these days, and that can be seriously irritating. Choose what you do and don’t want to be notified about by going into the Settings menu and selecting Notifications. You might be surprised by the number of sections you have to trawl through.
4/11 Save data
Facebook automatically plays videos in your News Feed, and that’s a problem if you aren’t on a generous data plan. You can change this by going to Videos in the Settings menu and disabling autoplay. On the app, there’s feature in the left-hand column called Data Saver, which also does this, but reduces the size of pictures too.
5/11 Reorder your News feed
You can choose to order the updates that appear in your News Feed by time or importance. Just hit the three buttons next to News Feed Preferences on the Facebook site and choose between Top Stories and Recent Stories.
6/11 Download your data
Facebook lets you download all of the immense amounts of data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a lot of information, which you’ll want to get your hands on if you decide to quit the social network.
7/11 Find nearby places
Nearby Places is actually a really handy tool, which lets you quickly find and research things like restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife hotspots around you. It lives in the left-hand column, and also shows useful information like customer ratings, prices and distance.
8/11 Find free Wi-Fi
Similarly, Find Wi-Fi is ideal for when you’re bored, running low on data or lost. It shows you all the places in your vicinity that offer free Wi-Fi, so you can head over and either relax or get some work done.
9/11 Save things for later
Facebook’s ideal for killing time, but every now and again you’ll stumble across something you’re interested in right as you need to put your phone away. Fortunately, you can save posts for later by hitting the arrow in the top-right corner and selecting the Save option. Everything you save goes straight to the Saved section in the left-hand column.
10/11 Control tags
When people tag you in posts or pictures, they don’t have to automatically appear on your profile. You can switch on Facebook’s Review Tags feature by going to Settings and Timeline and Tagging.
11/11 Delete your account
To permanently delete your Facebook account, you need to head to Facebook’s Delete Account page. The site can take up to 90 days to process account deletion requests, but once your account's gone, it’s gone. You can deactivate your account instead, by going to Security and Login in the Settings menu.
“Nobody likes being regulated, but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs, etc) that's a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too,” he added later.
“Biggest impediment to recognizing AI danger are those so convinced of their own intelligence they can't imagine anyone doing what they can't.”
A recent University of Oxford study concluded that AI will be better than humans at all tasks within 45 years , and many people, including Stephen Hawking, believe humans will be in trouble in the future if our goals don't align with those of machines. 
However, following the exchange of increasingly heated words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un , some Twitter users pointed out that nuclear war might wipe humans out before AI even gets the chance to.  
Mr Musk has spoken out about the potential dangers of AI on numerous occasions, and recently engaged in a war of words with Mark Zuckerberg , who has a very different outlook to him.
After Mr Musk called AI “a fundamental existential risk for human civilisation”, the Facebook founder branded his views as “negative” and “pretty irresponsible”.
Mr Musk hit back by saying Mr Zuckerberg’s understanding of the subject was “limited”.