The Book of Minds by Philip Ball

Author:Philip Ball [Ball, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

CHAPTER 7

Machine Minds

‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,’ the legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned in 2014. That he had no expertise in AI did not prevent the claim from making headlines; after all, Hawking was Hawking. But he’s not alone: tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has warned that AI could be ‘our biggest existential threat.’ Such concerns were reiterated in an ‘open letter’ by seemingly more qualified experts early the following year. AI leaders at Google and elsewhere, roboticists, and academic specialists in computer science were among the cosignatories who said that ‘we cannot predict what we might achieve when [our] intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide’ – but warned that ‘our AI systems must do what we want them to do’, for otherwise the consequences could be dire.

Science fiction is filled with tales of AI not doing what we want it to. From the machines of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) to HAL 2000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Skynet in the Terminator film franchise, to the malign super-intelligent AIs of The Matrix, we seem positively to revel in the nightmare that our machines will conquer, enslave, and eradicate us.

Our pessimism about the prospects of AI could seem odd – not least from Hawking, who latterly relied on it and related technologies to permit him any kind of communication with the world. He and others who warn of the impending dangers of AI do generally acknowledge the huge benefits it might bring – the open letter mentioned above stated that it ‘has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems’, adding that ‘The potential benefits are huge . . . the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable.’ Still, we worry if we’re doing the right thing by developing machines that might rival or surpass us in intelligence.

This fear has old roots. It stems partly from a distrust of art and artifice, a conviction that ‘artificial’ means ‘unnatural’ and is thus bound to go awry. The malevolence of the ‘created being’ finds voice in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and ever since robots (from the Czech word meaning ‘serf’ or ‘indentured labourer’) made their debut in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R. U. R. they were portrayed as soulless beings that might wipe out humankind. Asimov called this fear the ‘Frankenstein complex’.

The distrust of AI is also a fear of the Other, of the unknown. Because we don’t understand the AI’s ‘mind’, we project onto it the worst that lurks in our own. The result, though, is a peculiar prospect: those who seem most troubled by our lack of knowledge about the kinds of mind AI might conceivably harbour appear to be oddly sure they know what it will (or at least could) be like.

Yet while some futurologist-prophets insist on forecasting the worst, many of those working at the pit-face of AI research tend to regard these dire warnings with disdain, even despair.

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