Human egos & the battle for Artificial Intelligence. Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg vs Sergey Brin & Larry Page.

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• The question is not “if” but “when.
• When will our minds be seamlessly integrated with software to operate hardware?
• Remote limbs, organs, machinery.
• Fleets of self-driving vehicles.
• Aircraft.
• Armies.
• Or… other minds.
• What will happen the day we find ourselves surrounded by artificial intelligence?
• What role will we play in this reality?
• It’s been two decades already since IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat grand master Garry Kasparov at the chess table.
• Fast forward to May 2017: shockwaves ripple across the nerdsphere in Asia and the world when the Google-owned computer program AlphaGo defeats Chinese wunderkind Ke Jie in a three-game Go match.
• Loosely resembling checkers, the venerable table game of Go pits two players against each other in a quest to capture the most possible squares on a grid.
• Conceived many many centuries ago in China, it is played worldwide but is most popular in East Asia.
• The game presents seemingly countless combinations of the utmost complexity.
• Skilled players are consummate strategists.
• Yet they must rely heavily on intuition as well.
• The difference between AlphaGo and the Deep Blues of lore?
• The unnerving notion that AlphaGo’s innovative tactics and unorthodox gambits are self-taught.
• Let’s put it this way: DeepBlue was one phenomenal coffee machine; AlphaGo added to the equation a prodigious, eager to learn and eager to please barista.
• Who might entertain secret fantasies of becoming the store manager someday.
• Or opening her own chain of coffee shops, why not.
• To once and for all do away with those oh-so-cute hipsters and their nasty habit of calling in sick.
• I’ll have a double shot decaf soymilk latte to go. And your job, please.
• Enter Elon Musk.
• Also known as the new Steve Jobs.
• The PT Barnum of Palo Alto.
• Or the South African Tony Stark.
• The Pretoria-born, Canadian and American naturalized magnate has taken Silicon Valley and the stock markets by storm with a few of the hottest startups in the world today.
• Among them, Tesla Motors.
• Yes, those eerily quiet ultra sexy electric sportscars that seem to be popping up like mushrooms in the poshest zip codes of America.
• Riding high on Tesla’s wild success, Mr. Musk is aggressively pursuing other business interests such as, but not limited to, solar power (SolarCity) and space travel (SpaceX).
• Quite some job description, huh?
• Renowned for bringing his ideas to life and going to market with new products at breakneck speed, in 2014 Mr. Musk was an early investor in AI firms DeepMind and Vicarious, alongside the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher.
• Vicarious’s aim, according to British paper The Guardian, is to build a neural network capable of replicating the part of the brain that controls vision, body movement and language.
• Its ultimate goal according to the company’s co-founder Scott Phoenix?
• To build a “computer that thinks like a person except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep”.
• And this was three years ago.
• A distant past by Silicon Valley standards.
• More recently, Mr. Musk has announced, albeit in an enigmatic way, that he is investing in another venture called Neuralink.
• The company, which is allegedly in its earliest stages and has proven to be quite elusive to public scrutiny, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain with the purpose of helping the mind “merge” with software and digital processing power.
• As described in a recent TechCrunch article, Musk’s vision will attempt to remove all or most friction in the current state of human to human and human to machine exchange of concepts.
• Sound, letters, words, keyboards, screens and motion-based computing interfaces are bound to become relics of a bygone era.
• In other words, we will do away with the necessity of translating a thought into a language, which subsequently must be backtranslated by the receiving party.
• Minds melded with machines.
• Better life through circuitry.
• “Over time…” expresses Mr. Musk “…I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological and digital intelligence… it’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself…”
• With some caveats: the trailblazing father of five has repeatedly stressed the fact that we must collectively keep “… an eye on what’s going on with AI (because) there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.”
• We -authorities, academia, press and public- must embrace artificial intelligence, yes, but under much needed human, adult supervision.
• In other words, government regulation.
• Which doesn’t seem to be the point of view of Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp fame, who claimed recently that he is “… really optimistic (…) I think that people who are naysayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios …(about the dangers of artificial intelligence)… Idon’t understand it. I think it’s really negative and (…) pretty irresponsible.”
• Then again Mr. Musk, not one to shy away from controversy, picked up the glove and went on the record saying “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.”
• Mr. Musk’s fear is that, left unchecked, the ascent of AI might some day turn us flesh & bone folks into unwitting, quote unquote, house cats.
• Meow.