IBM is telling Congress not to fear the rise of an AI 'overlord'

The brains behind IBM's Jeopardy-winning, disease-tracking, weather-mapping Watson supercomputer plan to embark on a lobbying blitz in Washington, D.C., this week, hoping to show federal lawmakers that artificial intelligence isn't going to kill jobs -- or humans. To hear IBM tell it, much of the recent criticism around machine learning, robotics and other kinds of AI amounts to merely "fear mongering." The company's senior vice president for Watson, David Kenny, aims to convey that message to members of Congress beginning with a letter on Tuesday, stressing the "real disaster would be abandoning or inhibiting cognitive technology before its full potential can be realized." Labor experts and reams of data released in recent months argue otherwise: They foretell vast economic consequences upon the mass-market arrival of AI, as entire industries are displaced -- not just blue-collar jobs like trucking, as self-driving vehicles replace humans at the wheel, but white-collar positions like stock trading too. Others fear the privacy, security and safety implications as more tasks, from managing the country's roads to reading patients' X-ray results, are automated -- and the most dire warnings, from the likes of SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, include the potential arrival of "robots capable of destroying mankind."