Gigaom AI Minute – May 2

Transcript

We recently surveyed Gigaom's audience about their views on artificial intelligence. Our audience is primarily made up of business people that have an interest in technology and I would like to use the next several AI minutes to explore the answers.

The second question was if you hear a high profile individual--like an Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking--issue dire and draconian warnings about artificial intelligence, how does that make you feel?

Well, 15% of people said, "It worries me," and shockingly, 60% said, "It worries me, but we're going to be able to handle whatever comes along." A quarter of the people said, "I'm not worried at all," and the number of people who said, "I don't know," was well under 1%. So, the people that are worried total 75%, and the people that aren't worried, total 25%. What's interesting, of course, is that artificial intelligence so far hasn't demonstrated any of the capabilities, any of the dangers, that people warn about it. Instead, our experiences with it are that it filters our spam and guides us through traffic and all of that. The warnings that are issued are around a general intelligence, a different kind of artificial intelligence than what we're building, but it seems that the credibility of those individuals carries a lot of weight with our audience.