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[RAYK Q&A RAY KURZWEIL ANSWERS QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE FUTURE]
Hello and welcome to RAYK Q and A,
the show where Ray Kurzweil
answers questions about the future.
[HOW DO WE AVOID A ROBOT APOCALYPSE?]
This week's question,
how do we avoid a robot apocalypse?
You know, the challenge up until recently was,
[RAY KURZWEIL Author, Computer
Scientist, Inventor and Futurist.]
oh, AI is never gonna work,
can't even tell the difference
between a dog and a cat,
now people are saying, "Oh, my God.
It's gonna work and could destroy the world."
Technology has in fact been a double edged sword
ever since fire, you know,
which kept us warm and cooked our food,
it could also burn down our villages.
[Three phases you go through]
I talk about in How to Create
a Mind three phases you go through
[in encountering the potential
of these technologies.]
in encountering the potential
of these technologies.
[One is delight at the potential
of these technologies]
One is delight at the potential
of these technologies
[to overcome age-old problems,
like overcoming disease and poverty.]
to overcome age-old problems,
like overcoming disease and poverty and so on,
then alarm, that, oh, my God,
this could go awry as you point out
and there's lots of Times features and movies
that portray that dramatically.
[Finally, I think you come out,
at least I came out,]
Finally, I think you come out,
at least I came out,
[to a cautiously optimistic perspective.]
to a cautiously optimistic perspective.
And we need to give a high priority
in how to keep these technologies safe.
We have one good example of success.
Thirty years ago, it was recognized
that biotechnology would ultimately
overcome disease and so on,
but could also destroy humanity
and that you could create a new life,
some new virus that's highly replicable,
deadly, and stealthy.
So they had a conference
called the Asilomar Conference.
They came up with guidelines
called the Asilomar Guidelines
on how to keep this technology safe,
both to avoid accidental problems
and intentional problems.
And so far it has worked well.
We're now beginning to get
the clinical benefit of biotechnology
and the number of problems
either accidental or intentional
so far has been zero.
Now that doesn't mean
we can cross it off our concern list,
because the technology
continuous to get more and more powerful
and there's more and more scenarios
for how it could be abused.
But it does give us a good model or template
for how to deal with these new existential risks.
And I've been very involved in this discussion
about the promise versus danger,
particularly the danger of AI
and a similar approach will work
and there are various guidelines to how to,
you know, carefully define
the mission of a program,
and built-in safeguards
to prevent it from being hijacked
to some other purpose.
It's not a foolproof approach.
I think we can take comfort from
how well it has gone in these
exponential technologies so far.
But I would say,
it's the primary issue in humanity,
you know, we have all these raging debate,
you know, here in United States
about various issues in the political arena
with it being a presidential election year
and the most important issues
are not discussed at all.
The most important issue
is how do we reap the promise
while controlling the deprival.
[RAYK Q & A]
Thanks for watching RAYK Q and A.
Stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday.
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