Full AI, with capacities comparable to the human brain or better, is at least two or three decades away, so we have time to think about how to handle the technology
The experts run the whole gamut from A to B, and they're practically unanimous: Artificial intelligence is going to destroy human civilisation. Expert A is Elon Musk, polymath co-founder of PayPal, manufacturer of Tesla electric cars, creator of Space X, the first privately funded company to send a spacecraft into orbit, and much else besides. “I think we should be very careful about Artificial Intelligence ,” he told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in October. “If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that.”
Mr Musk warned Artificial Intelligence engineers to “be very careful” not to create robots that could rule the world. Indeed, he suggested that there should be regulatory oversight “at the national and international level” over the work of Artificial Intelligence developers, “just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish.”
Expert B is Stephen Hawking, world's most famous theoretical physicist and author of the best-selling unread book ever, A Short History of Time. He has a brain the size of Denmark, and last Monday he told the British Broadcasting Corporation that “the development of full Artificial Intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” A genuinely intelligent machine, Mr Hawking warned, “would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.” So be very, very careful.
Mr Musk and Mr Hawking are almost 50 years behind popular culture in their fear of rogue Artificial Intelligence turning against human beings (Heuristically programmed Algorithmic Computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey). They are a full 30 years behind the concept of a super-computer that achieves consciousness and instantly launches a war of extermination against mankind (Skynet in the ‘Terminator’ films).
Then there's ‘The Matrix’, ‘Blade Runner’ and similar variations on the theme. It's taken a while for the respectable thinkers to catch up with all this paranoia, but they're there now. So everybody take a tranquiliser, and let's look at this more calmly. Full Artificial Intelligence, with capacities comparable to the human brain or better, is at least two or three decades away, so we have time to think about how to handle this technology.
Such a society might well end up as a place in which intelligent machines had ‘human’ rights before the law, but that's not what worries the sceptics. Their fear is that machines, having achieved consciousness, will see human beings as a threat. The saving grace in the real scenario is that Artificial Intelligence will not arrive all at once, with the flip of a switch. It will be built gradually over decades, which gives us time to introduce a kind of moral sense into the basic programming, rather like the innate morality that most human beings are born with.
Our moral sense doesn't guarantee that we will always behave well, but it certainly helps. And if we are in charge of the design, not just blind evolution, we might even do better. Something like Isaac Asimov's Three laws of Robotics, which the Master laid down 72 years ago.
First law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First law.
Third law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second laws. As Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, has observed, however, it may be hard to write an algorithmic moral code strong enough to constrain and contain super-smart software.