Opinion
Elon Musk Fires Back at Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker Over the Future of Artificial Intelligence
— March 2, 2018

By Melissa Schilling
Solitude is known to be valuable for creativity.
By Melissa Schilling
Musk fired back with a tweet:
Wow, if even Pinker doesn't understand the difference between functional/narrow AI (eg. car) and general AI, when the latter *literally* has a million times more compute power and an open-ended utility function, humanity is in deep trouble
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2018
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2018
Musk's point is that autonomous cars are (for now at least) using "weak" or "narrow" artificial intelligence. This refers to software programmed to follow rules to achieve a narrowly-defined task. Some programs can learn to improve at their task (just as Cortana gets better at understanding your voice commands and the Google Search algorithm gets better matches for queries over time), but the programs do not get to change their objective; they only have the objective for which they were built. Weak artificial intelligence is all around us--it deploys your airbag in a car crash, it turns off the dryer when the clothes are dry enough, and more.
Read full article as published by Inc.
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Melissa Schilling is a Professor of Management and Organizations.