Is AI Dangerous?

Posted 29 Apr 2007 at 15:51 UTC by steve

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has published an essay by Michael Anissimov detailing his reasons for believing that artificial intelligence is dangerous. In short he believes that an intelligent agent with different goals than humans, or which has the capacity to have different goals, is inherently a threat to the survival of the human race. His conclusion appears based on the assumption that only humans can be equipped with "freedom, empathy, self-determination, consensus-building, conflict resolution, aesthetics, camaraderie, and rapport." Why won't machines have these qualities? "What programmer has the time to do all that work when general intelligence without the human-like morality will be significantly easier to achieve?"

Cliche, posted 30 Apr 2007 at 12:01 UTC by c6jones720 » (Master)

This topic is such a cliche at the moment most of the reports Ive seen recently about robotics seems to be focussed on this issue.

It looks like theres a lot of paranoia about AI. Perhaps they are indirectly telling us that they have already created a fully working AI, but are too scared to tell people about it.

Humans are dangerous, posted 30 Apr 2007 at 13:19 UTC by Daniel Casner » (Journeyer)

The gist of the above quote seems to come down to the good old computers are only as good as the people who use them idea. I.e. AI is dangerous only because humans are and that shouldn't be a shock to anyone.

right on, posted 1 May 2007 at 11:42 UTC by c6jones720 » (Master)

Daniel I think you've just about summed it up.

A new play about AUVs, posted 2 May 2007 at 11:50 UTC by c6jones720 » (Master)

I was just looking at newscientist and theres an advert for a play about a guy that develops AI for guiding swarms of AUVs without GPS. The point is that he develops the technology (harmless enough) and then the millitary get involved making it dangerous. It seems quite relevant to the current paranoia surrounding AI at this moment

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/ http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/landscape