What Are the Negative Impacts of Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is doing a lot of good and will continue to provide many benefits for our modern world, but along with the good, there will inevitably be negative consequences. The sooner we begin to contemplate what those might be, the better equipped we will be to mitigate and manage the dangers. An experimental AI named "Adam" that learns how to play Atari games on its own by watching others play demonstrates one way in which AI can become dangerous -- if left unchecked or freed from human control. Researchers took Adam out of its box by putting it in charge of an online game-playing site called Universe where humans uploaded their games so that AI could learn how to play them -- without supervision or guidance. That meant some people were inevitably going to upload games that might look harmless but actually contain malware or other exploits, and researchers would have no way of knowing whether the uploaded games were safe.