When I first got out of Law School in the 1980s, "professionals" didn't type ... that was your assistant's job (or the "typing pool," which was a real thing too). At that point, most people couldn't have imagined what computers and software are capable of now. And if you tried to tell people how pervasive computers and'typing' would be ... they would have thought that you were delusional. My career has spanned a series of cycles where I was able to imagine what advanced tech would enable (and how businesses would have to change to best leverage those new capabilities). Malcolm Gladwell suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of focus and effort for someone to become an expert at something.

Over at "SkepticalScience", which is neither skeptical nor scientific, they're hyping a new "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) tool developed by John Cook et al. to identify "denialist claims". The paper laying out this foolishness is in Nature Scientific Reports in an article with the most sciency title of "Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change". "Ultimately, our goal is the Holy Grail of fact-checking, which is being able to detect and debunk misinformation in real time," said Cook, who partly developed the framework previously at George Mason University. Because in total contradiction to point 4 immediately above, that experts are not unreliable, one of the finest physicists of my lifetime, Richard Feynman, famously said: Nature Magazine, a premier scientific journal and a huge defender of the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, has an article on the subject which says: So clearly, Nature Magazine is a secret nest of climate "denialists" whose claims should be censored before anyone can be misled by them … and while that example alone should be enough to totally discredit their artificial stupidity, it's just the first of many. So it's gonna identify articles pointing out that while in most of the media heatwaves are always explained as climate change, cold spells are just plain old weather … For most species, including humans and coral reefs, a change of a degree in average temperature over fifty years means nothing.

I remember mentioning to Igor Aleksander -- one of the great AI pioneers and thinkers -- while I was interviewing him for Philosophy Now magazine, that for many people, AI was going to be an unexpected, shrink-wrapped, 2-for-1 deal. What was the unexpected item in the bagging area? Well, if you recognise the phrase in italics, you are probably an experienced user of supermarket self-service checkouts (probably British; feel free to provide the equivalents in French, German, etc.), where the machines seem rather too easily surprised. The extreme short-sightedness that prevents them seeing what is to us entirely foreseeable, and their inflexibility in general, leads almost inevitably to a rather one-sided dialogue concerning the shortcomings of the machine, the designer, the manufacturer, and the store operator, that can be neatly encapsulated in the simple phrase, "Stupid bloody machines!" Alas, Artificial Stupidity is as inevitable as natural stupidity, but we take natural stupidity largely for granted because we know we are all fallible. It's the perfectly ordinary consequence of having soft, squishy brains with a limited capacity for understanding anything, let alone a world we can only dimly perceive.

Cambridge, Massachusetts ― A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled the world's first artificial stupidity prototype yesterday. They have dubbed their project the Artificial Stupidity System, or ASS for short. "We originally had a robot with nearly perfect AI, but we had to drastically modify the system," explained head researcher Susan Wilcox. "The old model could respond to anything a human said, learn to perform tasks, simulate a wide range of emotions ― all of that was easy. But it just couldn't pass the Turing test."

Welcome to the latest article in TNW's guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we'll examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts. In this edition we're going to flip the script and talk about something that might just save us from being destroyed by our robot overlords on September 23, 2029 (random date, but if it actually happens your mind is going to be blown), and that is: artificial stupidity. You won't find any comprehensive data on the subject outside of the testimonials at the Darwin Awards, but stupidity is surely the biggest threat to humans throughout all of history. Luckily we're still the smartest species on the planet, so we've managed to remain in charge for a long time despite our shortcomings.

Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Although superintelligence is certainly a possibility, the interest it excites can distract the public from a more imminent concern: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the roots of Frankenstein Syndrome in Mary Shelley's famous novel of 1818. It then provides a philosophical framework for analysing the stupidity of artificial agents, demonstrating that modern intelligent systems can be seen to suffer from 'stupidity of judgement'. Finally it identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, oppress or seduce their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can serve human intellect as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways in which even stupid artificial agents can evade human control, for instance by appealing to stereotypes or distancing us from reality. And they underscore the continuing importance of the literary imagination in an increasingly automated society.

Humans have both intelligent and "stupid" behavior, should self-driving cars be likewise? When someone says that another person is intelligent, you pretty much assume that this is a praising of how smart or bright the other person might be. In contrast, if someone is labeled as being stupid, there is a reflexive notion that the person is essentially unintelligent. Generally, the common definition of being stupid is that stupidity consists of a lack of intelligence. This brings up a curious aspect.

"Let's not use society as a test-bed for technologies that we're not sure yet how they're going to change society," warned Carly Kind, director at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an artificial intelligence (AI) research body based in the U.K. "Let's try to think through some of these issues -- move slower and fix things, rather than move fast and break things." Kind was speaking as part of a recent panel discussion at Digital Frontrunners, a conference in Copenhagen that focused on the impact of AI and other next-gen technologies on society. The "move fast and break things" ethos embodied by Facebook's rise to internet dominance is one that has been borrowed by many a Silicon Valley startup: develop and swiftly ship an MVP (minimal viable product), iterate, learn from mistakes, and repeat. These principles are relatively harmless when it comes to developing a photo-sharing app, social network, or mobile messaging service, but in the 15 years since Facebook came to the fore, the technology industry has evolved into a very different beast. Large-scale data breaches are a near-daily occurrence, data-harvesting on an industrial level is threatening democracies, and artificial intelligence (AI) is now permeating just about every facet of society -- often to humans' chagrin.

"Let's not use society as a test-bed for technologies that we're not sure yet how they're going to change society," warned Carly Kind, director at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an artificial intelligence (AI) research body based in the U.K. "Let's try to think through some of these issues -- move slower and fix things, rather than move fast and break things." Kind was speaking as part of a recent panel discussion at Digital Frontrunners, a conference in Copenhagen that focused on the impact of AI and other next-gen technologies on society. The "move fast and break things" ethos embodied by Facebook's rise to internet dominance is one that has been borrowed by many a Silicon Valley startup: develop and swiftly ship an MVP (minimal viable product), iterate, learn from mistakes, and repeat. These principles are relatively harmless when it comes to developing a photo-sharing app, social network, or mobile messaging service, but in the 15 years since Facebook came to the fore, the technology industry has evolved into a very different beast. Large-scale data breaches are a near-daily occurrence, data-harvesting on an industrial level is threatening democracies, and artificial intelligence (AI) is now permeating just about every facet of society -- often to humans' chagrin.

"Let's not use society as a test-bed for technologies that we're not sure yet how they're going to change society," warned Carly Kind, director at the Ada Lovelace Institute, an artificial intelligence (AI) research body based in the U.K. "Let's try to think through some of these issues -- move slower and fix things, rather than move fast and break things." Kind was speaking as part of a recent panel discussion at Digital Frontrunners, a conference in Copenhagen that focused on the impact of AI and other next-gen technologies on society. The "move fast and break things" ethos embodied by Facebook's rise to internet dominance is one that has been borrowed by many a Silicon Valley startup: develop and swiftly ship an MVP (minimal viable product), iterate, learn from mistakes, and repeat. These principles are relatively harmless when it comes to developing a photo-sharing app, social network, or mobile messaging service, but in the 15 years since Facebook came to the fore, the technology industry has evolved into a very different beast. Large-scale data breaches are a near-daily occurrence, data-harvesting on an industrial level is threatening democracies, and artificial intelligence (AI) is now permeating just about every facet of society -- often to humans' chagrin.