Clearly, Musk just got a private screening of a pirated print of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
In all seriousness, the danger of machine cognition (which is a more descriptive term than “artificial intelligence” which no one can really define very rigorously) isn’t that the machines will rise up and enslave us, or will slaughter everyone, or turn us into organic batteries, or whatever. Even if that were possible we could easily prevent such behavior by designing in inhibits akin to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, or even easier, a remote “kill switch” which neutralizes whatever power or metabolic functions keep the device working.
The real danger is much more subtle and unfatuitous, and in fact, it is already occurring and has been to some degree for millennia. That danger is that we will become increasingly dependent on these tools and losing basic skills and capabilities which we have previously developed and passed on which have defined the basic principles of civilization. Previously, these tools have been largely mechanical, serving only to enhance or supplant our physical actions or perform simple algorithmic computations, but with the advent of complex devices which can literally “do our thinking for us”, we may start to allow basic social and technical skills atrophy, just as past generations have largely forgotten the arts of making fire via mechanical friction, navigating oceans via wind patterns and currents, or tracking game. When cognitive machines supplant the need to think critically, communicate with nuance, or perform difficult mental exercises, we may well become progressively more slothful and ignorant creatures while these “intelligent” machines follow their programming and attend to us while improving their own capabilities to do so recursively.
Think this is hyperbole? How many people can use logarithms to multiply and divide large numbers? How many know the process of making basic materials like glass or steel? Heck, how many know how to knap a flint knife or find water in a desert? If your answer is “Why bother? I can do or buy those things or their replacements with some manufactured device?” you’ve answered your own question; you shouldn’t bother because you’ve already ceded some aspect of your intellectual capacity for survival to some kind of machine.
Of course, we can’t all just go off and live the life of the noble savage, nor is there great virtue or salvation in doing so. But the reality that the further we become interdependent not only on society at large but on machines and mechanized processes, the more helpless and neotenic we become, until we will be no more capable than a small child of independent self-sufficiency. And there is really nothing that we can, or even particularly want, to do about that.
We have met the enemy, and they are us. Staring gap-mouthed and pot-bellied into the televisor.
Stranger