[The views below are my views and not necessarily the views of my employer, the Wikimedia Foundation.]
Hi Caroline,
Here are a few feedback points on my end:
* I'm not sure what the ultimate goal of the piece is: to raise awareness about the issues around machine learning and artificial intelligence, or to say that Elon Musk doesn't know the real challenges of AI, or to have a (friendly?) conversation with him, or something else. I would focus on one goal, and I would personally go with the first goal as it's an important one (and I know you know it:).
* Assuming that the goal is the first one:
** There are a few instances that you claim the future where machines can replace humans will never be here. You are basically claiming that artificial general intelligence (AGI) research will not result in what its aim is. This is a big claim: if you say it, you should prove it. :) I personally recommend staying away from this line of claim, because it's hard to prove, in fact, there may be such a future.
** In some dimensions, the future that Elon Musk is concerned about is very near (in some it's potentially very far, and it's good to plan for now: see the next point): the self-driving cars are one example. It is safe to say that they are here (it's the matter of when and not if). It is not hard to imagine all the traffic of a state in the U.S. such as California to be replaced with self-driving cars in some years, and these combinations of machines can cause serious harm. This can be due to ethical gaps, privacy and security gaps, etc. Once you enter the military world, there are even more real examples that again, are either being used or can be used relatively soon. The concerns around a distributed system of machines making decisions about what the next target is and how to react to it are very real and along the lines of what Elon Musk may be concerned about.
** The regulations have been forming in a reactive way in the past decades and this is a problem on its own, imo. It is reasonable to say that now that we have time and control over where we are heading, let's make sure we regulate things at a pace that we don't end up getting surprised and over-regulate, for example.
** I personally would skip the whole conversation style in this kind of article. In some of your audience, including me, it creates a first reaction of "yes, we taught him a lesson." which is (hopefully) quickly followed by: "but wait a minute, this person has so many great achievements and the media may have been exaggerating his views based on isolated comments." I cannot think that Elon Musk doesn't see many of the issues that the not-fully-informed/educated machine learning implementations can cause and you have listed. If the point of your piece is not to tell him he's wrong, then I would reconsider the style.
I hope this helps. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 9:50 AM, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon musk's AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget-killer-robots-heres-w...
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l