AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research Chief
Microsoft Research's chief has said he thinks artificial intelligence systems could achieve consciousness, but has played down the threat to human life. Last December, Prof Stephen Hawking told the BBC that such machines could "spell the end of the human race".
Mr. Horvitz also revealed that "over a quarter of all attention and resources" at his research unit were now focused on AI-related activities.
"There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences," he said. "I fundamentally don't think that's going to happen.
The division's work on AI has already helped give rise to Cortana - a voice-controlled virtual assistant that runs on the Windows Phone platform and will shortly come to desktop PCs when Windows 10 is released. "The next if not last enduring competitive battlefield among major IT companies will be artificial intelligence," he said.
"The notion that systems that can think, listen, hear, collect data from thousands of user experiences - and we synthesise it back to enhance its services over time - has come to the forefront now.
"We have Cortana and Siri and Google Now setting up a competitive tournament for where's the best intelligent assistant going to come from... and that kind of competition is going to heat up the research and investment, and bring it more into the spotlight."
But while the Microsoft executive describes himself as being "optimistic" about how humans might live alongside artificial intelligences, others are more cautious. The physicist Prof Hawking has warned that conscious machines would develop at an ever-increasing rate once they began to redesign themselves. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded," he said.
Prof Murray Shanahan provides an introduction to artificial intelligence
The Spectrum computer's inventor Sir Clive Sinclair has gone even further, saying he believes it is unavoidable that artificial intelligences will wipe out mankind.
"Once you start to make machines that are rivaling and surpassing humans with intelligence, it's going to be very difficult for us to survive," he told the BBC. "It's just an inevitability."
