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Artificial Intelligence will become as clever as humans within 50 years, a top academic has warned.
Toby Walsh, Scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said 2062 will be the year when humanity’s creations begin to outstrip their masters.
The researcher admitted this prospect unsettled him and urged our species to make urgent preparations for the rise of the machines.
‘I’m starting to get a little bit nervous about where it’s going and the important choices we should be making,’ he said at an event called the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.
He also fears the rise of autonomous killer robots, which are designed to kill and maim without needing to be controlled by a human.
‘Machines have no moral compass, they are not sentient, they don’t suffer pain and they can’t be punished,’ Walsh added.
‘This takes us into interesting new legal territory of who should be held responsible, and there is no simple answer.
‘Fully autonomous machines will radically change the nature of warfare and will be the third revolution in warfare.’
However, Walsh warned against doom and gloom, suggesting an apocalypse was not necessarily inevitable.
‘The future is not fixed,’ he continued.
‘There is this idea that technology is going to shape our future and that we are going to have to deal with it, but this is the wrong picture to think of because society gets to push back and change the technology.”
Elon Musk and the late Professor Stephen Hawking are some of the experts who have warned about the consequences of runaway AI development.
‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,’ Hawking warned.
‘Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.’
MORE: Elon Musk’s fears that artificial intelligence will destroy humanity are ‘speciesist’, said Google founder Larry Page
Earlier this year, Musk said there was no way of knowing how AI would develop after ‘the singularity’, which is the point at which a computer achieves super-intelligence and begins to surpass humanity’s own intellectual prowess.
‘It could be terrible and it could be great,’ Musk said.
‘It’s not clear.
‘One thing is for sure: we will not control it.’
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