Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exciting and interesting to think about – many Science Fiction writers have explored the subject, and lots of movies exist.

Author Ian M. Banks came up with The Culture, a symbiotic society of artificial intelligences (Minds and drones), humanoids and other alien species who all share equal status. Overall that works out well. If you’re looking for something new to read, check out those books! There are a lot of fantastic ideas in there.

But there are also many other stories about how AI can look good initially and then go terribly wrong. Worth a thought as well… to phrase it in my own words (and I see this in my work): people in tech can sometimes go a tad arrogant about the abilities of technology, and the risks (from little bugs to huge disasters).

See also the blog at the Washington Post, Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’

Tesla Motors / SpaceX chief Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

When asked whether his words meant we shouldn’t expect to see Hal 9000 installed on a rocket to Mars, Musk warned that the most dangerous iterations of man-made AI would make the 2001 computer look like “a puppy dog.”

To explain to the youngsters… HAL 9000 is a computer in “2001, A Space Odyssee“, a famous movie by Stanley Kubrick. It was made in the late 1960s. You can find it in good video stores, and it’s definitely worth watching. It’s perhaps a bit slow-going compared to recent movies, but deal with it. Remember that when this was made, humanity hadn’t set foot on the moon yet, Unix and C hadn’t been invented yet, the Internet was a handful of university computers and no web, and there were no mobile phones or any computers in homes. Most households didn’t yet have colour television, many didn’t have television at all. Yet 2001 shows, for instance, tablet computers… pretty slick.