Microsoft can’t seem to make up its mind whether AI is or is not a threat to mankind

Notions of doom and gloom stemming from mankind’s eradication by hyper-advanced AI have been sprouting up regularly as of late; with a different intellectual wagging his finger “beware” almost every week. The first in this latest generation of warnings came from the living-legend, Professor Stephen Hawking himself (although, no finger wagging was actually involved). Next, Elon Musk echoed the same sentiments. And finally, Microsoft founder Bill Gates threw in his two cents as well. What’s somewhat amusing about this last example is that only a day prior, Microsoft Research chief, Eric Horvitz, claimed such a scenario can never occur.

Speaking with readers during one of Reddit’s famed “ask me anything” segments, Gates wrote: “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well…A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.”

Ironically, Horvitz just stated: “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.” He adds “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.”

Of course, Horvitz may be considered the most qualified to give his opinion on the matter of the four gentlemen,  considering that he’s won an award in AI research and runs the Microsoft division responsible for Cortana, Windows 10’s virtual assistant. Horvitz believes that Cortana and its rivals will spur rapid development of the field in the next decade.

Horvitz’s primary AI-related concern, however, centers on the systems’ invasion of our privacy; the AI’s will not not only make deep-seated inferences about our lives based on quantified observations, but also weave this data together to form long term behavior predictions. Interestingly, he adds, the AI itself may offer resolution to this issue by tracking which services require what datum.

“You might be told, for example, in using this service you have a one in 10,000 chance of having a query ever looked at… So, I believe that machine learning, reasoning and AI more generally will be central in providing great tools for ensuring the privacy of folks at the same time as allowing services to acquire data anonymously or with only low probabilities of risk to any particular person.”

Source: BBC