Harnessing Artificial Intelligence

I've always loved movie robots, even the bad ones. But as the machines around us become unnervingly smarter, it's hard not to worry that artificial intelligence with malign intent--some version of the Terminator or HAL--will eventually be unleashed on the real world. Stephen Hawking warned that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." And when the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord examined a host of existential threats--asteroids, nuclear war, climate change--for his bracing book The Precipice, he ranked "unaligned artificial intelligence" the most probable of all. Plunging into the latest crop of AI books, I was somewhat comforted by experts' consensus that "the singularity"--the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence--is not imminent; guesses about the timing range from a few decades to centuries from now.