To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations.
At least inside the city of Seattle, driving is going to be a hobby in 2035. It's not going to be a mode of commuting the same way hunting is a hobby for some people, but it's not how most of us get our food.
The best students are ones that are willing to take intellectual risks and challenge conventional thinking.
I think it's important for us to have a rule that if a system is really an AI bot, it ought to be labeled as such. 'AI inside.' It shouldn't pretend to be a person. It's bad enough to have a person calling you and harassing you, or emailing you. What if they're bots? An army of bots constantly haranguing you - that's terrible.
Instead of expecting truck drivers and warehouse workers to rapidly retrain so they can compete with tireless, increasingly capable machines, let's play to their human strengths and create opportunities for workers as companions and caregivers for our elders, our children, and our special-needs population.
Some people have proposed universal basic income, UBI, basically making sure that everybody gets a certain amount of money to live off of. I think that's a wonderful idea. The problem is, we haven't been able to guarantee universal healthcare in this country.
Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?
Scientists need the infrastructure for scientific search to aid their research, and they need it to offer relevancy and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff - the useful from the noise - via AI-enabled algorithms. With AI, such an infrastructure would be able to identify the exact study a scientist needs from the tens of thousands on a topic.
I became interested in AI in high school because I read 'Goedel, Escher, Bach,' a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought 'Wow, this is what I want to be doing.'
I don't think that all the coal miners - or even more realistically, say, the truck drivers whose jobs may be put out by self-driving cars and trucks - they're all going to go and become web designers and programmers.
Machines and people are both necessary for Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, and neither is sufficient on its own.
The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals and have its own will and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game.
Things that are so hard for people, like playing championship-level Go and poker, have turned out to be relatively easy for the machines. Yet at the same time, the things that are easiest for a person - like making sense of what they see in front of them, speaking in their mother tongue - the machines really struggle with.