Overview

still struggling to solve even simple-seeming problems with machine learning. Self-driving cars have an extremely hard time under unusual conditions because many things that come instinctively to humans — anticipating the movements of a biker, identifying a plastic bag flapping in the wind on the road — are very difficult to teach a computer. Greater-than-human capabilities seem a long way away.

Musk is hardly alone in sounding the alarm, though. AI scientists at Oxford and at UC Berkeley, luminaries like Stephen Hawking, and many of the researchers publishing groundbreaking results agree with Musk that AI could be very dangerous. They are concerned that we’re eagerly working toward deploying powerful AI systems, and that we might do so under conditions that are ripe for dangerous mistakes.

If we take these concerns seriously, what should we be doing? People concerned with AI risk vary enormously in the details of their approaches, but agree on one thing: We should be doing more research.