Fighting Malevolent Artificial Intelligence

With the appearance of robotic financial advisers, self-driving cars and personal digital assistants come many unresolved problems. We have already experienced market crashes caused by intelligent trading software, accidents caused by self-driving cars and hate speech from chat-bots that turned racist. Today's narrowly focused artificial intelligence (AI) systems are good only at specific assigned tasks. Their failures are just a warning: Once humans develop general AI capable of accomplishing a much wider range of tasks, expressions of prejudice will be the least of our concerns. It is not easy to make a machine that can perceive, learn and synthesize information to accomplish a set of tasks.