It isn’t just Elon Musk and your neighbor with the fully functioning bomb shelter who think the robot revolution is not only inevitable, but that computers will win and ultimately, could possibly enslave humanity as a result: Apple co-founder Steve “The Woz” Wozniak is fully confident that artificial intelligence is going to triumph over mankind someday.
“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” Wozniak told the Australian Financial Review in an interview about the Apple Watch and self-driving cars.
Though he at first was skeptical of predictions that technology could soon mean machines would surpass humans in the near future, he says he’s become convinced that those predictions are coming true.
“Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people,” he says. “If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.”
He notes that we could end up as gods or akin to family pets, and while he isn’t sure which way it’s going to go, “well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.”
There is some hope out there for us, however, as he says there could be a cap to the burgeoning intelligence of artificial life with the end of Moore’s Law, a pattern that sees computer processing speeds doubling every two years.
By 2020, transistors will have shrunk to a single atom, Moore’s Law suggests, at which point it would be impossible for them to get smaller without scientists developing quantum computers to control their manufacture at a subatomic level.
So far, that’s not likely, Wozniak points out, as researchers haven’t been able to get quantum computing to a usable level for humans. But still, we should be prepared to face our robot overlords, just in case the technology does progress beyond that point.
“I hope it does come, and we should pursue it because it is about scientific exploring,” Wozniak said. “But in the end we just may have created the species that is above us.”
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on the Apple Watch, electric cars and the surpassing of humanity [Australian Financial Review]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment