AI and the Art of Manipulation

Drawing on the film "Ex Machina," and Plato's allegory of the cave, the chapter examines our relationship with increasingly complex technologies, including the possibility of AI that may one day be able to manipulate humans to achieve its goals. The eminent twentieth-century computer scientist Alan Turing was intrigued by the idea that it might be possible to create a machine that exhibits human intelligence. To him, humans were merely exquisitely intricate machines. And by extension, our minds -- the source of our intelligence -- were merely an emergent property of a complex machine. It therefore stood to reason to him that, with the right technology, there was no reason why we couldn't build a machine that thought and reasoned like a person.