Scary AI Is More "Fantasia" Than "Terminator" - Issue 58: Self

When Nate Soares psychoanalyzes himself, he sounds less Freudian than Spockian. As a boy, he'd see people acting in ways he never would "unless I was acting maliciously," the former Google software engineer, who now heads the non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, reflected in a blog post last year. "I would automatically, on a gut level, assume that the other person must be malicious." It's a habit anyone who's read or heard David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" speech will recognize. Later Soares realized this folly when his "models of other people" became "sufficiently diverse"--which isn't to say they're foolproof, he wrote in the same post.