Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn is trying to keep humanity safe from the existential threats of artificial intelligence. "Creating an AI is like launching a rocket."
The rapid pace of research into artificial intelligence, and the scale of the technology's potential benefits, show that companies have many reasons to move forward with the development of artificial intelligence or AI without calculating the risks.
Earlier this year, Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX, donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute to fund a global research program aimed at ensuring that AI will benefit the human race. The institute is a volunteer research enterprise co-founded in March of last year by Jaan Tallinn, one of the most well-known tech entrepreneurs for his role as a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa.
The Boston-based institute focuses on research into the potential dangers of human-level artificial intelligence. Its board of directors and scientific advisors include names like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and several professors from universities including MIT, Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, and Cambridge, among others.
"Building an AI is like launching a rocket. The first challenge is maximizing acceleration, but once it starts accelerating, someone has to focus on steering," Jaan Tallinn said at the time of Musk's donation.
Jaan Tallinn told ZDNet that, thanks to nearly a decade of experience in the gaming industry, he has always been interested in artificial intelligence, but also in ensuring the security of the technology.
In 1986, at the age of just 16, he began his career writing software for a local company assembling 8-bit computers for use in public schools. Three years later, Jaan Tallinn was involved in the creation of Kosmonaut, the first Estonian computer game to be released outside the country. In 1993, he founded Bluemoon Software, with which he created and developed the FastTrack P2P used by the popular music application Kazaa.
After that, together with his colleagues and Bluemoon co-founders Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu, Tallinn created the software for Skype, using the Kazaa backend.
In recent years, his interest in various emerging technology sectors has grown. For example, he founded a personalized medicine consulting firm, Metamed, in 2012 and was an early investor in artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies, which was acquired by Google last year for about $650 million.
He has also co-founded two organizations that study the risk of artificial intelligence to humans: In addition to the Future of Life Institute, he also helped found the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) with Cambridge professors Huw Price and Martin Rees.
Technology and its implications for the future of humanity have always been something very fascinating to him.
According to Jaan Tallinn, humanity is facing a number of different risks stemming from the rapid development of artificial intelligence, and it is not just technological uniqueness that should concern us.
“If we count the potential trillions of lives of people who are still unborn, then existential risks dominate more than anything else. (He talks about technological singularity). If we only count the lives of people who are already alive, then there are other challenges, like, say, with intelligent systems that will disrupt the labor market.”
Jaan Tallinn believes that rules and agreements regarding the development of artificial intelligence should come from industry, not international political institutions.
"I haven't seen any indication that policymakers can understand the security issues of AI," he said.
But we at iGuRu.gr continue to have our reservations. Which of you trusts Googleor Elon Musk?
If the goal of Jaan Tallinn's wishes and statements is to define a framework from today's industry and leave other institutions out, who will control and delimit the industry itself?
Source: secnews.gr
