I see no obstacle to computers eventually
becoming conscious in some sense.
That’ll be a fascinating experience and
as a physicist I’ll want to know if those
computers do physics the same way humans do
physics.
And there’s no doubt that those machines
will be able to evolve computationally potentially
at a faster rate than humans.
And in the long term the ultimate highest
forms of consciousness on the planet may not
be purely biological.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
We always present computers as if they don’t
have capabilities of empathy or emotion.
But I would think that any intelligent machine
would ultimately have experience.
It’s a learning machine and ultimately it
would learn from its experience like a biological
conscious being.
And therefore it’s hard for me to believe
that it would not be able to have many of
the characteristics that we now associate
with being human.
Elon Musk and others who have expressed concern
and Stephen Hawking are friends of mine and
I understand their potential concerns but
I’m frankly not as concerned about AI in
the near term at the very least as many of
my friends and colleagues are.
It’s far less powerful than people imagine.
I mean you try to get a robot to fold laundry
and I’ve just been told you can’t even
get robots to fold laundry.
Someone just wrote me they were surprised
when I said an elevator as an old example
of the fact that when you get in an elevator
it’s a primitive form of a computer and
you’re giving up control of the fact that
it’s going to take you where you want to
go.
Cars are the same thing.
Machines are useful because they’re tools
that help us do what we want to do.
And I think computation machines are good
examples of that.
One has to be very careful in creating machines
to not assume they’re more capable than
they are.
That’s true in cars.
That’s true in vehicles that we make.
That’s true in weapons we create.
That’s true in defensive mechanisms we create.
And so to me the dangers of AI are mostly
due to the fact that people may assume the
devices they create are more capable than
they are and don’t need more control and
monitoring.
I guess I find the opportunities to be far
more exciting than the dangers.
The unknown is always dangerous but ultimately
machines and computational machines are improving
our lives in many ways.
We of course have to realize that the rate
at which machines are evolving in capability
may far exceed the rate at which society is
able to deal with them.
The fact that teenagers aren’t talking to
each other but always looking at their phones
– not just teenagers – I was just in a
restaurant here in New York this afternoon
and half the people were not talking to people
they were with but were staring at their phones.
Well that may be not a good thing for societal
interaction and people may have to come to
terms with that.
But I don’t think people view their phones
as a danger.
They view their phones as a tool that in many
ways allow them to do what they otherwise
do more effectively.
