IEEE: Will AI (artificial intelligence) be our doom ?

[Phil]

I can accept TV scriptwriters making money out of vague doomsday scenarios, but when academics - especially those at elite universities - begin to do so via vague hand-waving "what-if" ideas, I think it's pathetic. It reminds me of the early doomsday scenarios of global warming, promoted to ridiculous proportions by academics at the University of East Anglia when they realized the more doom-laden the predictions, the more funding they could get. Conceiving strategies to avoid such problems is worthwhile, but this is on a par with Eric Drexler pronouncing himself the 'Father of Nanotechnology' without having carried out a single practical experiment, or people calling Arthur Clarke the "inventor" of the communications satellite. Bostrom is an overpaid sci-fi writer (and it appears his book is not even very readable), just as David Deutsch has built a career on interpreting the meaning of 'impossible' solutions to mathematical equations, without ever once accepting that those solutions could just be meaningless artifacts of an imperfect model of nature.

Rant over, I will concede that everything is relative. BBC TV's current Saturday evening prime-time entertainment is a show called "Tumbler", in which we all feel sad for five-minute celebrity contestants when they fail to become Olympic-standard gymnasts, even after a whole week of training.

I shall recover by returning to my copy of "Turing's Cathedral" by George (son of Freeman) Dyson. Superbly written, brilliantly planned, recommended to people who HAVE a modicum of intellect and an interest in digital evolution.

Phil M1GWZ



On 5 Sep 2014, at 15:28, Andre Kesteloot wrote:

> http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/will-superintelligent-ais-be-our-doom/
> 
> The comments below the article make for interesting reading
> 
> 73
> André N4ICK
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