Elon Musk drops wild 5-year prediction about AI and humanity | Latest Tech News
Is AI ushering in an “age of abundance” — or a digital apocalypse?
Whether people prefer it or not, it’s clear there may be no stopping the artificial intelligence freight practice now barrelling in the direction of some type of closing vacation spot.
The data facilities are being constructed, automation is already nibbling away at jobs and governments around the world are in a Manhattan Project-style race to attain the holy grail of AGI, or synthetic normal intelligence.
Big change is coming.
The only debate now is about the size and pace of the financial shock on the horizon, who’s going to lose their jobs — and whether or not you assume any of this is a good factor, not that you’ve gotten a say a method or another.
Elon Musk predicts AI will convey an “age of amazing abundance” within 5 years. The Economist/Youtube
“The future is going to be very, very different from the past and there is no analogy or metaphor that illustrates the magnitude of change we’re going to experience here,” Elon Musk said this week.
Speaking to The Economist in his first sit-down interview since SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, the world’s first trillionaire supplied the maximalist techno-optimist view of AI.
He believes that within just a few years, artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, there could possibly be as many as one billion humanoid robots, and an AI-fueled “age of abundance” will make money meaningless.
“There really won’t be anything AI won’t be able to do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps,” he said.
“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of. This may sound preposterous … of course there (are) things that might derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war … but assuming there is not World War III, I think we’re headed for age of amazing abundance. So this is a message of optimism and excitement about the future.”
Elon Musk speaks to The Economist Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes. The Economist/Youtube
Mr. Musk, whose Tesla carmaker is developing a general-purpose employee robot called Optimus, believes that within 5 years there could possibly be “at least 100 million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion” changing guide labour.
“I would predict the economy is probably twice its current size in five, maybe six years, because you’re going to hit a doubling period where economic output is increasing so fast,” he told Forbes in May.
He has also beforehand declared that saving for retirement is now pointless.
“Don’t worry about squirrelling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years — it won’t matter,” he said on a January podcast.
“You won’t need to save for retirement. If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”
In that post-scarcity state of affairs — which AI boosters argue will inevitably outcome in some type of common basic income (UBI) to help people with nothing left to do — co-host Peter Diamandis predicted, “the services will be there to support you — you’ll have the home, you’ll have healthcare, you’ll have entertainment”.
AI entrepreneur Dave Blundin agreed “the way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline”.
Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus distributes popcorn at a Christmas market stall. dpa/image alliance via Getty Images
“It’s called ‘singularity’ for a reason,” Mr. Musk said.
“I don’t know what happens after the event horizon.”
But not everybody agrees that AI is main humanity to a good place.
At the other excessive, vitality researcher Dr Chris Martenson, talking to podcast host Tucker Carlson this week, likened the race for AI to the Tower of Babel — the Biblical story of humanity’s catastrophic hubris.
“There’s nothing new under the sun,” he said.
“I honestly truly believe this AI thing, this is our Tower of Babel. It’s a device by which we’ve convinced ourselves we can finally get that exalted seat next to God, even parity, we are God now … and of course that lack of humility, that pride, that arrogance, has always backfired.”
So is it a story of doom or increase?
Australian futurologist Professor Rocky Scopelliti, creator of Perceptive Machines, said he was more optimistic than many commentators — but only if we put together to settle for a elementary break in the best way we expect about prosperity and work.
“The future of work isn’t fundamentally a labour problem — it’s becoming a governance problem,” he told news.com.au.
Tesla Optimus humanoid robot model and a Cyberquad all-terrain vehicle displayed at the new Tesla Museum in Shanghai. ZUMAPRESS.com
“The biggest disruption won’t be robots taking jobs. It’ll be the decoupling of income from labour. Automation can create extraordinary abundance. It doesn’t automatically create fairness. Ownership will matter more than technology.”
Prof Scopelliti said the defining financial query received’t be, “Will AI replace workers?”
“It’ll be, ‘Who owns the robots, the data and the intelligence?’” he said.
“Every industrial revolution changed how people worked. AI may be the first that changes why people work.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are uncovered to AI disruption, rising to 60 per cent in superior economies.
Goldman Sachs says 300 million full-time jobs globally are at risk of automation.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) tasks 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million displaced by 2030, a internet gain of 78 million jobs.
Professor Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the “Godfather of AI”, predicts mass joblessness.
“I think for mundane intellectual labour, AI is just going to replace everybody,” Prof Hinton said on the Diary of a CEO podcast last 12 months, referring to white-collar jobs, while also difficult the notion that AI would create new jobs.
“You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it [AI] just couldn’t do,” Prof Hinton added.
Microsoft AI chief govt Mustafa Suleyman is also on the pessimistic aspect.
Experts like Professor Geoffrey Hinton and Microsoft AI chief govt Mustafa Suleyman predict mass joblessness from AI. WavebreakmediaMicro – stock.adobe.com
Speaking to the Financial Times in May, he predicted “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” being completed by AI, with most jobs that contain “sitting down at a computer” being absolutely automated within the next 12 months to 18 months.
Prominent Stanford University economist Dr Erik Brynjolfsson, meanwhile, led 16 Nobel Laureates in a joint assertion earlier this month calling for pressing preparation for the financial impacts of radically more highly effective AI over the next 10 years.
“This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,” the assertion read.
“It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”
David Autor, Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is in the camp that argues AI is more seemingly to reshape occupations somewhat than “wiping out sectors or industries”.
“It will affect tasks and occupations and roles,” he told the Financial Times last 12 months.
“There will be many new jobs and opportunities and forms of expertise created by the way we use AI. There will also be … specific skills and forms of expertise and roles that are wiped out.”
Prof Scopelliti said whether or not AI would surpass human intelligence was no longer the most fascinating query.
Workers clean window panels on a industrial workplace building in Beijing, China. AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim
He argues we’re now getting into what he calls the “participation age” of AI — that while the last three years have been about AI producing content, the next decade will probably be about AI taking part in selections, organisations, economies and more and more our on a regular basis lives.
The big questions going ahead, according to Prof Scopelliti, will probably be how we govern machine participation, how we distribute the wealth AI creates, how we guarantee technology strengthens society somewhat than weakens it — and how we protect significant human company.
“We’re moving from machines that answer questions to machines that participate in society,” he said.
“That’s a much bigger transition than generative AI.”
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