Don't Panic about AI

According to legend, the medieval philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon created an all-knowing artificial brain, which he encased in a bronze, human-like head. Bacon, so the story goes, wanted to use the insights gleaned from this "brazen head" to make sure Britain could never be conquered. Following Bacon, a long-standing challenge for engineers and computer scientists has been to build a silicon-based replica of the brain that could match, and then exceed, human intelligence. This ambition pushes us to imagine what we might do if we succeed in creating the next generation of computer systems that can think, dream and reason for us and with us. Today there is little talk of brazen heads, but artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere.