Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: An Introduction for Policymakers

For most people, machines that can think and act on their own have, until now, been futurist fantasy. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968), Alex Proyas' I, Robot (2004), and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) have, along with many other creative works, variously portrayed fictive worlds profoundly altered by Artificial Intelligence and, especially, automata. The roots of these vivid tales reach down to a bedrock of Judeo-Christian folklore and Greek mythology from which, at least since the Middle Ages, have grown parables warning of the danger that comes from taking the place of the Creator.[1] Inhabiting Medieval Jewish folklore is one such, the golem, an automaton-protector made from mud which, in one story, prefiguring Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, runs amok.[2] As technology has evolved stories about the ambitions of its creators that end in tragedy have evolved with it -- lasting well into an age where an unchallenged scientific secularism rules our intellectual and moral worlds. Is this a residue of superstition in an enlightened age or a moral symbiosis? And if the latter, is its lesson that science should split the difference with superstition or that the humanities and religion, along with science, should retain this perspective: that good and evil live in man and not in his machines?