Elon Musk Says Humans Must Merge With Machines or Become Irrelevant
The future, at least in terms of economic activity, may well be dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), Tesla founder Elon Musk predicts while speaking at an event in Dubai. Humans must become part-machine to be able to interact and keep up with these form of technology, or risk irrelevance, Musk claims.
Musk raises the scenario of mass employment as AI could begin to supplant human work in more and more jobs. As machine-learning and robotics technology improve, "There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can't do better," the Tesla CEO tells the World Government Summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The key to keeping humans competitive is "a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk adds, as he explains his reasoning. Humans, according to the billionaire, must close the gap: "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."
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People who communicate and obtain information by talking, typing or reading can do so at a handful of bits per second. Compare that with the speed that computers can communicate — "a trillion bits per second," Musk explains, and proposes that humans will need to develop a way to directly connect with machines.
To take a theme from science fiction, Musk, in a report by CNBC, offers the idea of a high bandwidth interface "that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence."
What has been worrying the Tesla CEO is the eventual evolution of a simpler, special-purpose software, like those in the driverless cars his company develops, into what he called "Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)." Musk claims that an AGI, once developed, can potentially improve to the point of being "smarter than the smartest human on earth."
A more imminent problem, according to Musk, is the autonomous car. Musk agrees that it will be a great convenience — after all, it is one of the central concepts upon which Tesla is built. "But there are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people" Musk muses, warning that the change could come before people are prepared. "It will be very disruptive and very quick," he added.
