Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Hillary Clinton

Technologists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates, and physicists like Stephen Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence could one day pose an existential security threat. Musk has called it “the greatest risk we face as a civilization.” Think about it: Have you ever seen a movie where the machines start thinking for themselves that ends well? Every time I went out to Silicon Valley during the campaign, I came home more alarmed about this. My staff lived in fear that I’d start talking about “the rise of the robots” in some Iowa town hall. Maybe I should have. In any case, policy makers need to keep up with technology as it races ahead, instead of always playing catch-up.

Hillary Clinton, What Happened, New York, 2017, p. 241

David Chalmers

Not every method of creating human-level intelligence is an extendible method. For example, the currently standard method of creating human-level intelligence is biological reproduction. But biological reproduction is not obviously extendible. If we have better sex, for example, it does not follow that our babies will be geniuses.

David Chalmers, ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analaysis’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 17, nos. 9-10 (2010), p. 18

I. J. Good

Once a machine is designed that is good enough, […] it can be put to work designing an even better machine. At this point an “explosion” will clearly occur; all the problems of science and technology will be handed over to machines and it will no longer be necessary for people to work. Whether this will lead to a Utopia or to the extermination of the human race will depend on how the problem is handled by the machines. The important thing will be to give them the aim of serving human beings.

I. J. Good, “Speculations on Perceptrons and Other Automata”, IBM Research Lecture, RC-115 (1959), p. 17

Drew McDermott

In this paper I have criticized AI researchers very harshly. Let me express my faith that people in other fields would, on inspection, be found to suffer from equally bad faults. Most AI workers are responsible people who are aware of the pitfalls of a difficult field and produce good work in spite of them. However, to say anything good about anyone is beyond the scope of this paper.

Drew McDermott, ‘Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity’, CM SIGART Bulletin, no. 57 (April, 1976), p. 9