Showing posts with label blind spots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blind spots. Show all posts

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us; Quartz, April 1, 2018

Michael J. Coren, Quartz; Musk and Zuckerberg are fighting over whether we rule technology—or it rules us

"Firmly in Zuckerberg’s camp are Google co-founder Larry Page, inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, and computer scientist Andrew Ng, a prominent figure in the artificial intelligence community who previously ran the artificial intelligence unit for the Chinese company Baidu. All three seem to share the philosophy that technological progress is almost always positive, on balance, and that hindering that progress is not just bad business, but morally wrong because it deprives society of those benefits.


Musk, alongside others such as Bill Gates, the late physicist Stephen Hawking, and venture investors such as Sam Altman and Fred Wilson, do not see all technological progress as an absolute good. For this reason, they’re open to regulation...


Yonatan Zunger, a former security and privacy engineer at Google has compared software engineers’ power to that of “kids in a toy shop full of loaded AK-47’s.” It’s becoming increasingly clear how dangerous it is to consider safety and ethics elective, rather than foundational, to software design. “Computer science is a field which hasn’t yet encountered consequences,” he writes."