Deep Thinkers 4
Artificial Intelligence: Tool? Threat? Both?
Many of us came of age when "artificial intelligence" (I don't think that the name was even used then) was personified by robots: walking, talking mechanical critters that did everything from serving meals (AKA "Rosey" the robotic maid/housekeeper in The Jetsons cartoon series) to Gort (the implacable, indestructible peacekeeping robot in the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still). Some were benign and followed the rules, as in Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics. Some were harmless and even cute: such as R2D2 and C3PO in the Star Wars movie series that began in 1977. And some were evil personified, such as the Allied Mastercomputer (AM) in Harlan Ellison's truly frightening short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".
But just what IS artificial intelligence? Does it pose a threat to humanity? And if so, just how? Just how likely to come true are those dire predictions of our electronic thinking machines deciding that we, as in humanity, are no longer of any use?
For my part I worry about what I don't know about the science of artificial intelligence (which is to say, just about all of it) but that is what is scary. Are we harboring (and even helping to build) a force in our midst that, inevitably, one day we won't be able to control?
Or is the worry unjustified?
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