Bill Gates Says The Govt. Should Tax Robots, Elon Musk Says The Govt. Must Regulate AI Before Its Too Late

Uloma Mary Omolaiye, July 19, 2017

Overtime, the gravity of AI risk scenarios has been debated, leaving questions unresolved. Aside from the belief that the existence of these robot may take on supposed human jobs, there is also a major concern that an unexpected “intelligence explosion” may take the human race by surprise and subjecting it to control may be a harder problem than previously supposed. Elon Musk, one of the campaigners against the dependence on Artificial Intelligence (AI) discussed its dangers with the National Governors Association on Saturday, the 15^th of July. Elon Musk proposes that the government should regulate AI as it poses a danger to humanity.

He made this statement on the impending doom on humanity if nothing is done to keep robots abreast:

“I have exposure to the very cutting-edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it. I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.”

He expresses his concern further concerning jobs disruption especially in the area of transportation. “But what’s going to happen is robot will be able to do everything better than us” he says further as robots are getting smarter than we envisaged.

Musk defeated the opinion of AI experts who thought it would take another 20 years for a computer to beat a human playing Go, when he made reference to AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a Go world champion and arguably the strongest Go player in history. “It absolutely crushed the world’s best player. And now it can crush and okay the top 50 simultaneously and crush them all, Musk says.

The most dreaded potential for AI isn’t job loss; rather, a harm as scary as causing a war. By doing fake news, press release, imitating email accounts and unscrupulously influence information, there could be a breakout of war. Musk describes this as “a deep intelligence in the network”. The only reason people ignore the subject of the potential dangers of robotics and artificial intelligence is because do they do not have an understanding of its potential.

I think it’s time the government looked into the billionaire’s proposition. Why ignore a problem that could have been avoided?

Read Bill Gates’ idea of taxing robots (even though an EU Commissioner disagrees) to preserve human jobs.