| Talks ‘16 (Martin Talks 16, has twenty years’ experience in the digital technology and communications sectors, runs the company Matomico, a consultancy that helps companies and organisations with digital transformation and innovation initiatives, and aims to demystify the world of advanced technology, also cites Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, “A Marketer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence”, March 2016)
“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,” said Stephen Hawking in The Independent in 2014. “Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”11 In an interview with the BBC he added: “Humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by AI.”12 Elon Musk called AI “our greatest existential threat” in a 2014 interview with MIT students at the AeroAstro Centennial Symposium. “I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.”13 Musk has invested in a number of AI technologies through startups including DeepMind, acquired by Google for the rumoured sum of $400m (£285m) in 201414, and claims this is as a means to “just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence”15. Bill Gates has also expressed concerns about AI. During a Q&A session on Reddit in January 2015, Gates said: “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”16 In July 2015, Stephen Hawking, Musk and more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers signed a letter asking for a ban on AI warfare, warning of the potential for rampant destruction at the hands of autonomous weapon systems, which can select and engage targets without human intervention. “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms,” the letter said.
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