The Dark Side of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an intimate part of our lives. It all started in 1950 when philosopher and mathematician Alan Turing revisited the question of whether machines (or computers) can "think." This question was tackled by the early modern philosopher René Descartes, who argued that because thinking is a mental activity, physical bodies cannot think, thus ruling out that machines can think. Descartes took the fact that human languages are compositional and recursive (we can compose unlimited sentences with a limited number of signs) to be evidence of our ability to think. It was this second insight that set the stage for Turing's project.