Essay: When Artificial Intelligence Gets Too Clever by Half

There's an anthill in the way, but the engineers don't care or even notice; they flood the area anyway, and too bad for the ants. Just as we now have power to dictate the fate of less intelligent beings, so might such computers someday exert life-and-death power over us. Now replace the ants with humans, happily going about their own business, and the engineers with a race of superintelligent computers that happen to have other priorities. Just as we now have power to dictate the fate of less intelligent beings, so might such computers someday exert life-and-death power over us. That's the analogy the superstar physicist Stephen Hawking used in 2015 to describe the mounting perils he sees in the current explosion of artificial intelligence.