We Need a Plan for When AI Becomes Smarter Than Us

When Apple released its software application, Siri, in 2011, iPhone users had high expectations for their intelligent personal assistants. Yet despite its impressive and growing capabilities, Siri often makes mistakes. The software's imperfections highlight the clear limitations of current AI: today's machine intelligence can't understand the varied and changing needs and preferences of human life. However, as artificial intelligence advances, experts believe that intelligent machines will eventually – and probably soon – understand the world better than humans. While it might be easy to understand how or why Siri makes a mistake, figuring out why a superintelligent AI made the decision it did will be much more challenging.