Former Google CEO and Henry Kissinger: Manage 'Age of AI's Epoch-Making Transformations

"At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence," reports Time magazine: He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction... Schmidt: The visit to Google got him thinking. And when we started talking about this, Dr. Kissinger said that he is very worried that the impact that this collection of technologies will have on humans and their existence, and that the technologists are operating without the benefit of understanding their impact or history. And that, I think, is absolutely correct... Kissinger: [T]he technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It's a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason — the world in which I grew up — each evidence supports the other. With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don't know why. That's a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don't know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it.... Up to now humanity assumed that its technological progress was beneficial or manageable. We are saying that it can be hugely beneficial. It may be manageable, but there are aspects to the managing part of it that we haven't studied at all or sufficiently. I remain worried. I'm opposed to saying we therefore have to eliminate it. It's there now. One of the major points is that we think there should be created some philosophy to guide to the research. Time: Who would you suggest would make that philosophy? What's the next step? Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea. Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book. I think that the first thing is that this stuff is too powerful to be done by tech alone. It's also unlikely that it will just get regulated correctly. So you have to build a philosophy. I can't say it as well as Dr. Kissinger, but you need a philosophical framework, a set of understandings of where the limits of this technology should go. In my experience in science, the only way that happens is when you get the scientists and the policy people together in some form. This is true in biology, is true in recombinant DNA and so forth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

from Slashdot https://ift.tt/3o9myzh

Share on FacebookPlus on Google+

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER