What Will Artificial Intelligence Do To Us? Current Affairs

Will artificial intelligence soon outsmart human beings, and if so, what will become of us? The great computer scientist Alan Turing argued in the early 1950s that we were probably going to see our intellectual capacities surpassed by computers sooner or later. He thought it was probable "that at the end of the [20th] century it will be possible to program a machine to answer questions in such a way that it will be extremely difficult to guess whether the answers are being given by a man or by the machine." "Machines can be constructed," he said, "which will simulate the behavior of the human mind very closely" because "if it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and particularly in men, are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer, suitably programmed, will behave like a brain." Other early AI pioneers anticipated even more rapid developments. Herbert Simon thought in 1965 that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do," and Marvin Minsky said two years later that it would only take a "generation" to "solve" the problem of artificial intelligence. Things have taken a bit longer than that, and theorists in the field of AI have become somewhat notorious for making promises that we might call "Friedmanesque." But there are still those who think we have reason to fear that AI will surpass human intelligence in the near future, and, in fact, that an AI-driven cataclysm may be coming. Elon Musk--who, it should be noted, does not have a good track record when it comes to predicting the future--has warned that "robots will be able to do everything better than us," and "if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it." He is not alone in spinning apocalyptic stories about a coming "superintelligence" that could literally exterminate the entire human race.