Linux Creator Thinks "Future Robots Controlling Humans" Is Stupid

Well, things have certainly become interesting now. On one side, we have the genius professor Stephen Hawking, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak with many other theorists backing the inevitable, and then there is LINUX creator Linus Torvalds.

Torvalds, in a recent Q&A session with Slashdot users, has tipped the scales to balance in this ever debatable theory “Will the Machines Rise?”. The Linux creator does not think that Artificial Intelligence will ever reach the hypothesized ‘Skynet’ type situation to threaten human race. Although the internet was filled with the reports of a robot crushing a human to death in Germany last weekend, it still does not mean that the uprising has started.

While in a recent statement at a Freescale technology forum in Austin, Wozniak has pegged the robots to make humans their pets. In other news, Elon Musk feels the technology sophistication is humans biggest existential threat and has invested $10 million of his money into an artificial intelligence firm, just to keep an eye on the AI developments.

Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, doesn’t see the machines and AI to be fearful of, and he has reasons to believe that. He thinks the future AI will be like a recurrent neural network and it will need training by humans. The machines he said, ‘won’t be reliable in the traditional computing sense’ and humans would not be able to decipher the machines’ decisions.

Torvalds thinks the AI would be more targeted and user specific like language and pattern recognition, or perceiving the images and videos close to human understanding, but is wary of the fact that it would possibly become any existential threat to humans in future. Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg too has predicted the future of AI that includes abilities like these, and ‘telepathy’.

Linus rebuffed sci-fi theories of Singularity saying:

The whole “Singularity” kind of event? Yeah, it’s science fiction, and not very good SciFi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really..

The machines would definitely become fancier but in no possible way ‘discuss Sartre with you’, said Linus. Researchers have been trying to make AI more human-like by programming it to get the feelings and emotions of humans. Google’s AI chatbot was in the news a few days back when its makers sat down with a Q&A round with their bot, where the machine lost it totally when asked about morality and God. See, machines can’t understand and would never possibly do, the abstract logic and behavior of humans.

Torvalds think the growth of machines would possibly follow the Moore’s law in coming decades but it is just the beginning of the curve and the technological advancements to reach that level have just started.

So it’s not yet time to get cautious. Enjoy. Terminators are not coming any time soon :P

Source: Slashdot

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