Seems like the same problem as nuclear power, GM foods, and just about every other new but complex technology. People don't understand it, and we always fear what we don't understand.
Well, it's also that people who do understand it, can also be severely worried about scientists not understanding it and playing fast and loose for profit.
Medicine/biology can not even put out a decent non-conflicting dietary advice that holds its position for more than 10 years, but they are allowed to assemble genes they half-understand and put them out in an ecosystem whose interactions and complex interplays they understand 10% and just see what happens...
Clarifications by well-known researchers don't travel as far and wide as urgency-signaling clickbait...
Nuclear especially would be my go-to pristine example of this effect.
The use of GMOs has been demonized since corporations decided to patent them and sue farmers that owns naturally hybridized plantations. (see agricultural patent trolls)
Abuse is what generates criticism and resistance to the use of new technology. Yes, the reasons you hear may not be wholly technically correct.
Again, if the trust of internet users is abused, and those who browse are tracked and profiled and spyed on; then should we be surprised that there are publications like this?
That's how you get stories about creepy AIs. And a "technically wrong" label doesn't help, preventing abuse is much more effective.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17472698
Part of the problem was dealt with by export: https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/349-350/co...
Well, nuclear bombs have been associated with "Doomsday" / end of civilization ("Doomsday device") etc.
A) We're striving to make strong AI.
B) It seems plausible that as computing and AI research continues, we'll get to strong AI eventually given that brains are "just" extremely complex computers.
C) We do not know what strong AI will be able to do or how it will act, if it exceeds human intelligence.
The concern is not with the current state of the art, but what could happen in the future if we continue improving AI without seriously considering some safeguards against making a system that at some point becomes clever enough to start making itself even smarter.
I won't claim I'm an AI expert, but I think people like Musk and Hawkins deserve (based on their accomplishments) to be taken serious when they express concerns. I very much doubt that everyone in this thread dismissing their comments as irrational fear mongering have enough knowledge on the topic to do so.
Whenever I see discussions about the dangers of AI, they are always about those Terminator-like AI-overlords that will destroy us all. Or that humans will be made redundant because robots will take all our jobs. But there are never concrete arguments or scenarios, just vague expressions of fear. Honestly, if I think about all the things HUMANS have done to each other and the planet, I can hardly imagine anything worse than us.
Universe full of computronium, solving Collatz conjecture?
It seems that their concerns are always dismissed based on the current state of the art, which is short sighted to say the least.
Make no mistake, FUD kills. If you're in a position of influence, you want to make goddamned sure you're right before you hold back human (and machine) progress by focusing only on Things That Could Go Horribly Wrong. Otherwise, you're basically asking for unintended consequences instead of just trying to warn humanity about them.
Musk has actively been trying to incite governmental regulation, for instance: https://www.recode.net/2017/7/15/15976744/elon-musk-artifici...
... which is just outrageously inappropriate at this stage. If he goes full Howard Hughes, which I'm increasingly worried about, he could set us back decades.