Exofusion on Unintended Consequences of AI, Quantum: Video

Speaking at Applied Intelligence Live! Austin, Romi Mahajan, CEO of Exofusion, a startup focused on accelerating commercial nuclear fusion energy, gave an update on progress towards that goal.

Mahajan also elaborated on a panel in which he participated on whether AI, especially when combined with quantum, is beneficial to society, or whether it could have a disastrous downside, such as that depicted in the Terminator movies.

“Sometimes there are unintended consequences of even the best inventions,” he said. “When people first like us first looked at the atom and its nucleus and discovered something called binding energy, little did they know that this would become nuclear bombs.”

Mahajan said that it is impossible to assess all the consequences of new technologies, but the risk must be understood from the beginning to avoid the worst eventualities.

“AI has all kinds of positive perspectives, such as AI for health care for energy. We think about AI and machine learning all the time in the fusion space,” he said.

“But I am scared about what happens to people's jobs and what are the edge cases where AI becomes self-realized and, of course, things like weapons technologies are scary. On the other hand, look at cybersecurity. It’s a huge risk and we think we have great tools but the bad guys have great tools too. You have to look at it holistically.”