Submission + - First Elon Musk, now Steve Hawking warning us about evil AI. Should we be afraid (bbc.com) 7
These guys are clearly not software engineers, and have been watching too many science fiction films. Seems Stephen Hawking has a new voice that has scared him. Machine learning experts from the British company Swiftkey were involved in its creation. Their technology, already employed as a smartphone keyboard app, "learns how the professor thinks" and suggests the words he might want to use next.
Maybe he thinks it's gonna attack him and take over his identity one day, and nobody outside his world would know it's not really him?. Give me a break! These intelligent people should know enough not to venture into areas they don't understand.
I have played with neural networks myself, and they can only do what they are programmed to do. Of course they can be dangerous as much as any other software tool if, for example, employed by the NSA to sift through the petabytes of data they have on us all, Watson style. But then the danger comes from how the knowledge gained is used, not from the AI itself