FIVE YEARS? That's all the time we have until the robots attack? We thought it would be centuries before this happened. Sure, we read our Asimov and Bradbury, but something about robots becoming malevolent just never really seemed like something that would be possible in our lifetime – let alone in the next five years. But the gospel according to Elon Musk suggests otherwise.
Is the robot uprising on the horizon?
Within the tech sphere, Elon Musk is about as much of an authority as any. After all, he helped found Paypal and also runs SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He's also pretty notable for his decidedly un-CEO-like behavior, such as reducing his salary in 2013 to $1 – yes, you read that correctly (of course, it probably doesn't hurt that he's already worth billions).
Anyway, when Musk decides to say something about the state of technology – or the world, for that matter – you can bet he has a pretty vast listening audience. And so it likely was with rapt and terrified attention that Musk's many followers processed his assertion – on the comments page of the futurology site Edge.org – that robots will begin doing serious harm in a few short years.
"The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast," Musk reportedly wrote. "Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast – it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. Ten years at most."
But before you start panicking and building your anti-robot kits – whatever those will entail – it's worth looking a little bit more closely at Musk's comment. First of all, as Business Insider pointed out, Musk apparently deleted the comment a few minutes after he posted it, which perhaps means that his heart wasn't entirely in it. Another thing to consider is that Musk has been in robot-terror mode of late, and that this most recent comment isn't the first one he's made. At a recent conference hosted by Vanity Fair, Musk made similar comments, adding that for robots, getting rid of humans may one day be as easy as "getting rid of e-mail spam."
Scary thoughts to be sure, but exactly how on the mark is Musk? Granted, we don't have direct access to Deepmind, but we can access the next best thing – Google. So here's what we concluded about robots with some quick Googling:
- They are definitely becoming more pervasive: There's absolutely no denying that robots are playing an increasingly important part in everyday life. And as The Daily Telegraph pointed out, AI is gradually taking over more and more jobs that used to be powered by humans.
- They can come up with cool magic tricks. According to Gizmodo, artificial intelligence has been harnessed to come up with original magic tricks for magicians who are tired of using the same old tricks. This experiment was carried out at Queen Mary University of London, and involved equipping computer software with the fundamental AI to grasp magic tricks. From this base of knowledge, AI-driven software was able to come up with new and original tricks, ones that might have a better shot at fooling a given audience.
So although robots may be taking our jobs and entertaining us with magic tricks, it doesn't look like they're taking our lives. Yet. Still, when someone like Musk speaks up, it's hard not to listen, and so we think it may be time to dust off the Asimov volumes.
