Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

Author:Mo Gawdat
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Until the turn of the century, technology only accelerated our speed and extended our horizons . . .

. . . but had no will or intelligence of its own.

For example, the fastest human runs at a speed of 45 kilometres an hour. Using a technology called the automobile, that speed is enhanced to 300 kilometres an hour. In that sense, the car may be the fastest ‘runner’ on earth, but surely not the smartest. The car will only go fast when a driver pushes the pedal to the metal. It won’t decide what speed it wants to go at or where it is heading. Cars just extended our ability to travel quickly as they became our extremely fast, obedient slaves. Without a human, cars sat in parking lots and junk yards. They could never choose to drive themselves out of the sun. Well, the cars of the past didn’t. That is no longer the case.

Autonomous, self-driving vehicles and every other type of similarly AI-powered tech will have a will of its own. Think about that because this is where the intelligence will start to manifest itself. If it is too hot in the parking lot, autonomous cars may choose, without your blessing, to move to a shady spot. They may choose to navigate their path to the airport through a different route and could even choose to commit suicide and throw themselves off a mountaintop, if their intelligence told them this could save the life of a child or perhaps even another car. Yes. This is the true meaning of the word autonomous – the ability to make their own decisions and, in the near future, develop their own decision-making methods. Rather disconcerting when you consider it. I mean, think about those autonomous war machines that are a bit like an autonomous car but with a machine gun attached to them. And what about other autonomous machines that make decisions we can’t even observe with our own eyes? While a car in motion is still sort of manageable, in terms of predicting what it might do, AIs that perform billions of transactions a minute, such as the ones that decide which ad or content to show you on the internet, are already way faster than anything we can control. We don’t even fully understand how they arrive at these decisions that affect our lives and influence our views of the world so profoundly. Furthermore, if you ask the developers of these machines how they work, they will tell you how they trained them and the kinds of decisions that the machines are capable of making. They will rarely share the exact logic the machine followed to make those decisions. Because . . . well . . . they don’t actually know.

You see, there is one small detail that is somehow usually omitted from the conversation when experts and innovators speak about the artificial intelligence they’ve created. A tiny little truth that you only fully grasp when you’ve developed one yourself:

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