Ray Kurzweil said at the Exponential Finance conference, “We have a moral imperative to continue the promise of artificial intelligence while controlling the peril. I’m optimistic, but we shouldn’t be lulled into a lack of concern.”

Kurzweil’s view contrasts Elon Musk’s, who caused a stir last year when he tweeted, “Worth reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, PhD. We need to be careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Bostrom’s book proposes scenarios where humans end due to artificial intelligence.

Kurzweil said, “Musk is a major investor in artificial intelligence. He said we could have super-intelligence in 5 years. A radical position. I don’t know any practitioners who believe that.” He continued, “So far, we have effective ways of dealing with emerging existential risks. We will see more positive benefits of artificial intelligence and gain confidence we can control it.”

Kurzweil, who is co-founder of Singularity University and now Director of Engineering at Google said convergence is the future for humans and artificial intelligence.

“We are going to directly merge with it, we are going to become the AIs,” he said. His Google team is using AI techniques to deal with language and learning, collaborating with Google’s acquired start-up Deep Mind, who developed a neural network that learned how to play video games successfully. […]

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