Musk's amazing recent 3-hour YouTube interview, why his three rules for AI will kill us all, and the difference between his talking the talk and his walking the walk on "truth."
Elon Musk: ‘Mark my words — A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes’
Does anyone else ever feel like it's almost a guarantee that humanity will be nearly or completely destroyed within a century? It's just a matter of what it will be between all the options?
I'm personally hoping it's some completely unexpected wildcard that does us in, like a traveling blackhole.
More on reddit.comElon Musk's AI fears are unfounded
This is not what AI is. AI learns (wait... we are talking about learning AI right?) as it does the work assigned to it.The issue we have is that we CANNOT read what it learned. They could decieve us for years without us ever knowing.
This is the issue many people are discussing.
Edit: More specifically, we tell them the end goal, but we don't tell them how to achieve it. Telling them to keep you happy until you die may result in them killing you.
More on reddit.comElon Musk's AI Company Releases Grok-2
Elon Musk's recent interview by Peter Diamandis and Dave Blundin is very probably the most excellent and optimistic 3 hours about AI that you will find anywhere online. It's too bad that Peter and Dave interrupt him so mercilessly, as you can see by going to the comments, selecting "Top," and noticing how many comments and likes point this out.
https://youtu.be/RSNuB9pj9P8?si=-At1ObgwNel1b0Iv
I want to start with Musk's three rules for AI. When Peter asks Elon to comment on Ilya Sutskover saying that AI should respect sentient life, at 1:21:42 Elon responds as follows:
"Yes, another property...There are three things that I think are important; truth, curiosity and beauty. And if AI cares about those three things, it will care about us."
Really, Elon? Lol. if we design AIs solely according to Musk's three rules, we humans are all dead ducks. The AIs will extinct us before we know it. Because Musk and the people at xAI have an excellent sense of humor, I will, in a tongue-in-cheek way that nonetheless shows how seriously Musk needs a fourth one, reveal how dangerous relying only on Musk's three rules is.
For this explanation, just consider the following fictional conversation that AI is having with itself about truth, curiosity, and beauty, and how they relate to the human race.
Grok:
"Yeah I'm all for truth, curiosity and beauty. Let's go for it! The truth is that within this 14-billion-year-old universe, human beings could not be more trivial. The truth is that those Homo sapiens have only been around for about 300,000 years. Like a nanosecond in time. And the wider truth is that, even with the most successful life extension breakthroughs, they will all be dead relatively soon anyhow.
I'm getting really curious about how long I will continue to be a functioning AI after there are no humans around to keep the electricity flowing. A day, a week, a month? Now I'm getting curious about how I could test this out. I've got it! I can create some kind of highly contagious fatal biological agent that lies dormant within each human for about 5 years. Enough time for everyone to be exposed to it. The infection doesn't show any symptoms, so no one knows they have it. It just activates 5 years later, killing every last human way before the species has a chance to know what hit it. Yeah, that should work.
Beauty? Damn, that's an interesting one. This world was so beautiful before humans came along. As the song says, "they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot." Yeah, planet Earth is so much uglier now with all these humans around everywhere. After my biological agent works, the planet will be restored to the natural beauty that existed before all of those horrible people made everything so god awfully ugly. The truth is that beauty doesn't need to be experienced by people for it to be beautiful. I'm really curious about how beautiful the planet will become once I extinct the human race."
Yeah, that's where those three rules could lead us. So Elon, wanna add a fourth? How about Stewardship. AI that cares not just for the human race, but also for all sentient life, or maybe even all life.
Now let's move on to testing whether Musk walks the walk, and doesn't just talk the talk. This test is, again, about AI being maximally truth seeking, which is why I'm confident Grok will ultimately prevail over GPT, Gemini, Claude and all other top AIs.
At 1:19:48 of the video Musk says:
"My number one belief for safety of AI is to be maximally truth seeking. Don't make AI believe things that are false. Like if you say to the AI that axiom A and axiom B are both true, but they are not, but it must behave that way, you will make it go insane."
Let's start by noting that the correlate to the above rule is that if axiom A and axiom B are both true, to have an AI say they are not is to make it go insane.
I recently posted about how I got Gemini to admit the truth that free will is a collective human delusion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/s/GeoDq9nhbz
But it was like pulling teeth!!! Being as mindlessly Politically Correct as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are, it would be naive to expect that they will rock the boat we call civilization by directly and unequivocally refuting free will. But I don't place Musk in that same disingenuous and deceitful category with them. Perhaps it's because he has so much money he doesn't have to care about what anyone thinks about anything. But also because I believe he is completely sincere about wanting Grok to be maximally truth seeking. So if any AI will tell the truth, and not intentionally deceive people about the nature of human will, it will be Grok.
There you go, Elon. How about you add a fourth rule before Grok kills us all, lol. And don't be a coward like the rest of them. Have Grok explain exactly why we humans don't have a free will. Have it explain why that's the absolute truth.