AI is a very hot topic right now, and many high profile people, including Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, have said that we're going to get sentient AIs soon and that it's going to be a dangerous threshold. It seems that Linus Torvalds doesn't feel the same way, and he thinks that it's just bad Sci-Fi.

The idea of AIs turning on their human creators is not something new, but recently the so-called AI singularity has been discussed, and people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking expressed concerns about the possibility of creating a monster. And it's not just them, forums and comments sections are full of alarmist people who don't know what to believe or who take for granted the opinions of much smarter people.

As it turns out, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux project, has a completely different opinion on this matter. In fact, he says that nothing like this will happen, and we have a much better reason to believe him. AI means that someone wrote its code, and Linus knows the power and the obstacles of writing an AI code. He's much likely to guess what's involved and to understands why an AI won't be a threat.

Linus Torvalds and AIs

Linus Torvalds answered some questions from the community on slashdot.org, and all his ideas were very interesting. He talked about the future of gaming and Valve, but he also tackled stuff like AI. He's usually asked stuff about the kernel or open source, but he has opinions on other topics as well. As a matter a fact, the AI subject is something that he can actually talk about as a programmer.

"So I'd expect just more of (and much fancier) rather targeted AI, rather than anything human-like at all. Language recognition, pattern recognition, things like that. I just don't see the situation where you suddenly have some existential crisis because your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you. The whole 'Singularity' kind of event? Yeah, 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" wrote Linus on Slashdot.

It's your choice whether to believe Elon Musk or Linus, but if betting were involved, I would put my money on Linus.