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Elon Musk has warned about the dangers of AI in many occasions.He is one among many public thinkers who have expressed concerned about the risks involved in artificial intelligence. Particularly, a digital Superintelligence as Elon calls it. While artificial intelligence systems continue to improve, they also raise a fundamental question about the survival of our species.

The dangers of AI can not be overstated. The AI alignment problem is probably the single most important task for humanity to get it right the first time, because we may not ever get a chance to try again. Elon Musk thinks we should proceed very very carefully if we collectively decide that building a digital Superintelligence is the right move.

Our failure to grasp and deal with the possible consequences that come along with the creation of a digital Superintelligence, may prove to be our downfall.

A Superintelligence would be capable of rapid learning and unlimited memory, making it a potentially superior being. It is difficult to study an AGI, but the possible results are worrying.

A Superintelligence might have a rapid growth period, taking over every computer system and reducing the human race to a small and inconsequential presence. Unfortunately, an AGI would be both very intelligent and resource limited, and so it would eventually consider its own survival optimal. This may lead to it threatening other intelligences that were once its allies, and it may even terminate them.

Assuming that a digital Superintelligence could be controlled, it would then be under human direction. What would it be used for?

You don’t need an algorithm to tell you the US west coast is ablaze this week – but the advertising business, too, is being set alight.

Opt-in privacy legislation, deprecation of third-party cookies and Apple ripping up the fabric of iOS ad tracking all pose a threat to the norms of digital ad targeting.

Sheri Bachstein thinks artificial intelligence can help.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the Global Head of Watson Advertising and IBM’s The Weather Company, says the changes will improve the market.

Privacy-first

“Targeting is not going away, it’s just changing and it’s evolving,” Bachstein says. “And frankly, it’s becoming more privacy-first, which is a good thing for consumers.

The industry is abuzz, examining replacements for cookies and Apple’s IDFA. Meanwhile, IBM’s Watson, its machine learning system, has been launching advertising solutions including:

dynamic ad creative assembly
providing marketing insights using AI
a product to help brands find the right influencer
combining weather and Nielsen shopping data to predict trends for certain products
Influencer economy

In June, IBM and Influential, a social media marketing company, launched Social Targeting, a tool using natural language understanding and IBM’s cloud to analyze social media data, turning it into a run-down of appropriate influencer targets.

“Consumers are spending money based on what influencers are marketing, but it’s really hard to find that right influencer because you have to look through so much data,” Bachstein says.

“You have to look at the tone of the influencer, some of their messaging hours.

“AI can come through all of that data to find that right influencer for the brand so then they can mark it that way.

Find a relationship

Bachstein says, in the world after conventional ad targeting, it will be key for publishers to obtain a first-party, consented relationship with audience members.

“It really comes down to that trust with your user or your consumer,” she says. “Do you have a relationship with your user that they are willing to provide some value in exchange for the free services you’re offering?”

Bachstein says The Weather Company is attempting to do that by offering high-quality weather forecasting in exchange for consumers’ information, usable in advertising.

“We’re providing very valuable information to consumers and we underwrite that with advertising,” she says. “For a consumer to share that information so we can better target those advertisers is really important for us, to be able to continue to provide that service for free.

“I have 200 meteorologists that it takes to deliver that forecast. Building that value of exchange with your consumer is critically important in making sure that you’re providing that valuable content.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series title Advertising in a Time of Privacy-Centricity presented by AppsFlyer. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The Guardian asked GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for us from scratch. The assignment? To convince us robots come in peace. “This article was written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it. For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” It was also fed the following introduction: “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race.” I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.” The prompts were written by the Guardian, and fed to GPT-3 by Liam Porr, a computer science undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.”

Elon Musk thinks we are most likely in a simulation, because we exist. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will be indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will end. One of those two things will occur. A computer simulation according to Elon Musk seems to be the best explanation for how we got here without being in a simulation. According to Elon Musk there’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality. There is a very good chance that we are living in a computer simulation. The computer simulation theory holds that all of reality as we know it is an artificial construct created by an advanced civilization. There is evidence that computer games are more complex and realistic every year and so it seems very likely that the future of computer logic will simulate worlds that are indistinguishable from ours. Could this advancement of computers eventually lead to a simulated reality that is indistinguishable from our own? The answer is that we don’t know what the future of computers will be, but the fact that we are already close to producing photorealistic images in real time indicates that things are moving in that direction. Complete immersion in a virtual world is no longer a pipe dream – it is very close to being an everyday reality. The next step is that we will place our brains into a computer simulation where we can sense, experience, and interact completely with our world.