14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced that Professor Stephen Hawking would hold a keynote speech at the company’s Future Decoded event in the United Kingdom opening its doors on November 1.
Hawking will discuss artificial intelligence in a conference during the first day of the event and will detail how this rapidly evolving technology could affect the mankind.
UK’s star physicist Stephen Hawking has previously warned that artificial intelligence could actually wipe out humanity because it has the potential to become at least as clever as a human being.
“The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence. A super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble,” he said one year ago.
“You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let's not place humanity in the position of those ants.”
Microsoft and AI
Microsoft is one of the companies that are aggressively investing in artificial intelligence and CEO Satya Nadella is one of the biggest supporters of this rapidly evolving technology.
Nadella has previously acknowledged that securing artificial intelligence against attacks is one of the biggest challenges right now, explaining that what it happened with the Tay chatbot, which started tweeting racist remarks after talking with users, is living proof that AI must be resilient to attacks.
“Just like you build software today that is resilient to a DDOS attack, you need to be able to be resilient to a corpus attack, that tries to pollute the corpus so that you pick up the wrong thing in your AI learners. We are very much there trying to deal with those challenges,” Nadella said.
The upcoming conference will certainly be an exciting event for those interested in artificial intelligence, and Professor Stephen Hawking’s keynote might become one of the key moments.