Calling artificial intelligence the most disruptive force in history, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk discussed the end of the modern workforce by a fireside on the final day of the AI Security Summit at Bletchley Park.
“For the first time, we're going to have something that's smarter than the smartest person,” Musk said. “It's hard to say exactly what that time will be, but there will come a time when you don't need a job – if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction, you can have a job, but AI can do everything,” he said.
Artificial intelligence is not new. The idea of robots, supercomputers, and superintelligence is nearly a century old. However, it was the modern advent of generative AI that forced the world to pay attention to the work that computer scientists and enthusiasts do mostly on the fringes.
According to Musk, who compared it to a magical genie who grants wishes, most human needs disappear when their needs are met.
“You can ask for anything, and we won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal maximum income,” he said. “So in a way, it's going to be somewhat leveler, equal, because everyone has access to this magic genie.”
But while Musk predicts AI will change the workplace as we know it, others — including British artificial intelligence researcher and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman — disagree.
“He's not an AI scientist,” Suleiman told the BBC in response to Musk's prediction. “His knowledge is more about space and cars.”
In the year Founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Suleyman, DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGO program conquered the Go world. Champion Lee Sedol in a five game match. In the year In 2022, Suleiman co-founded the machine learning and creative AI firm Inflection AI.
Suleiman acknowledges that the concerns surrounding generative AI are valid. However, he said it is too early to say whether AI will replace humans.
“I think we should definitely be worried about the 50-year horizon, and I think it's right to be worried,” Suleiman said. “Each new technology unsettles the landscape, but also offers incredible benefits.”
Suleiman's comments echoed the AI Security Summit at Bletchley Park, where policymakers from around the world came together to discuss and make plans for how to tackle and control AI.
At the conference, 29 countries and the European Union signed the Bletchley Declaration, which emphasizes the need for a common approach to AI security, developing a science-based understanding of these risks and risk-based policies tailored to each country's unique situation. and encourage cooperation and transparency between governments.
Generative AI—or AI—used to generate images, text, music, and video has taken the world by storm since the official launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT last year and GPT-4 in March. Its use to create more detailed and realistic deep-fakes has led world leaders to warn of the need for safeguards against who uses the technology and the spread of misinformation.
“I think the main point to make now is for democratic governments to make decisions that benefit everyone,” Suleiman said. “This is a time when we need the state more than ever.”
“We need good governance, and we need to be alert to these rules,” he concluded.
