No killer robots: Linux founder ridicules AI fears

Linus Torvalds sees robot rulers as bad science fiction

Linux founder Linus Torvalds has ridiculed the likes of Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak who are afraid that Artificial intelligence (AI) poses a threat to humans.

Torvalds (pictured) aired his views on AI during a Q&A on Slashdot, during which he described Wozniak's claims that humans will be become the pets of robots in the future as thoughts derived from science fiction.

"I just don't see the thing to be fearful of. The whole 'singularity' [whereby machines transcend biology and humanity] kind of event? It's science fiction, and not very good sci-fi at that, in my opinion. Unending exponential growth? What drugs are those people on? I mean, really," he said.

Torvalds is more welcoming of the intelligent machines and computers, although he believes that effective AI is a long way off and will not surpass anything beyond machine learning any time soon.

"We'll get AI, and it will almost certainly be through something very much like recurrent neural networks," he said.

"And the thing is, since that kind of AI will need training, it won't be 'reliable' in the traditional computer sense.

"It's not the old rule-based prolog [high-level computer programming language designed for AI] days, when people thought they'd ‘understand' what the actual decisions were in an AI."

Torvalds suggested that these neural networks will be very interesting but prohibitively difficult to produce, which will limit where they are deployed, the size of the networks and their function.

Instead, Torvalds predicts that the technology industry will produce more advanced versions of AI systems for language and pattern recognition.

"I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you," he added.

"Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves."

While Bill Gates warns the world to watch out Terminators, and Elon Musk cautions about the rise of the machines, Google is struggling to find the skills it needs to develop its AI systems.