Elon Musk + Stephen Hawking + CBC = robot revolution

by
in ask on (#3P9)
story imageCBC News is looking out for your health and safety, by combining unrelated quotes by Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, adding a Terminator image, and making sure you are well warned of the impending robot revolution. Here it is:
Two leading voices in the world of science and technology warn that robots equipped with artificial intelligence could be leading humanity down a dangerous path.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla motors, told a pair of CNBC reporters that he thought robots were "dangerous."

"There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator."

Despite his reservations, Musk himself has recently invested in an artificial intelligence company.
The first strike by the robots would be, naturally, to cripple humanity by operating on human unborn in the womb. That's a bad thing, no a good thing, no wait, now I'm confused.
Reply 5 comments

if i were AI.... (Score: 2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-20 10:11 (#271)

i'd start world takeover by changing wikipedia entries, and removing knowledge from the internet. then i'd take to comment systems like this one, and start to convince people one-by-one (or technically all at once) that the AI takeover is the best thing for them. No knowledge is No Power.

-Kim Jong-ai

Re: if i were AI.... (Score: 3, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-20 12:14 (#273)

Given the quality of reporting at places like CBS and CNN these days, there is reason to believe AI already exists, and is intentionally dumbing us down by feeding us a steady diet of Kim Kardashian articles, weight loss tips, and vapid sit-com programming. We may not have yet created artificial intelligence, but as far as I can tell, real intelligence is quickly fading. At least in America.

Is this a joke? (Score: 1)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-06-20 15:57 (#277)

Is it really? Using Terminator as a source when talking about AI?

We haven't even come close to making truly intelligent machines yet. That's like some skinny dude saying he wants to work out but "doesn't want to be ripped". We don't have anywhere near the skill or knowledge required to make machine that could even begin to be a threat to us. Hell, we don't even really know what we're looking for; there is no consensus on what makes our brains so special that we are "intelligent" while our machines just follow instructions. They're basically all brute forcing the problems that are presented to them, with clever tricks being programmed in by humans to reduce the parameter space on hard problems. Ugh...

Is it me or is Hawking getting increasingly more alarmist as time goes on? In the past few years, he's warned us about nuclear war, aliens, machines... What's next? Bees? Should we be afraid of bees? Are they plotting to overthrow us? What time is it on the "Bee overthrow doomsday clock"? I must know!

Re: Is this a joke? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-06-20 17:24 (#278)

The joke is that CBS took two serious things, made a ridiculous connection between them, added a terminator graphic, and made an ignorant, alarmist topic out of it. The second joke is that this qualifies as news in American mainstream media.

Re: Is this a joke? (Score: 1)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-06-22 18:26 (#27V)

The third joke is that this was CBC, not CBS, and it's "American" media only in a specific sense which is not the way that word is usually used.