“There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences. I fundamentally don’t think that’s going to happen.”
— Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond Lab, on artificial intelligence. His comments come after people such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have sounded alarms about the dangers of AI.
Horvitz chooses optimism: “I think that we will be very proactive in terms of how we field AI systems, and that in the end we’ll be able to get incredible benefits from machine intelligence in all realms of life, from science to education to economics to daily life,” he said, according to the BBC.
Horvitz should know — he’s among those who are engaged in proactive study of AI in the form of a long-term Stanford University project, as our own Steve Johnson wrote last month. Other efforts include that by the Future of Life Institute. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that Musk donated $10 million to FLI, which will establish a global research program that aims to ensure AI stays “beneficial to humanity.”
Back to Horvitz’s optimism/excitement. Among other things, he’s pumped about intelligent assistants. “We have Cortana and Siri and Google Now setting up a competitive tournament for where’s the best intelligent assistant going to come from,” he said, according to the BBC. (Cortana is Microsoft’s, Siri is Apple’s.) “That kind of competition is going to heat up the research and investment, and bring it more into the spotlight.”
