Years ago I had coffee with a friend who ran a startup. He had just turned 40. His father was ill, his back was sore, and he found himself overwhelmed by life. Dont laugh at me, he said, but I was counting on the singularity.

My friend worked in technology; hed seen the changes that faster microprocessors and networks had wrought. It wasnt that much of a step for him to believe that before he was beset by middle age, the intelligence of machines would exceed that of humansa moment that futurists call the singularity. A benevolent superintelligence might analyze the human genetic code at great speed and unlock the secret to eternal youth. At the very least, it might know how to fix your back.

But what if it wasnt so benevolent? Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who directs the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, describes the following scenario in his book Superintelligence, which has prompted a great deal of debate about the future of artificial intelligence. Imagine a machine that we might call a paper-clip maximizerthat is, a machine programmed to make as many paper clips as possible. Now imagine that this machine somehow became incredibly intelligent. Given its goals, it might then decide to create new, more efficient paper-clip-manufacturing machinesuntil, King Midas style, it had converted essentially everything to paper clips.

No worries, you might say: you could just program it to make exactly a million paper clips and halt. But what if it makes the paper clips and then decides to check its work? Has it counted correctly? It needs to become smarter to be sure. The superintelligent machine manufactures some as-yet-uninvented raw-computing material (call it computronium) and uses that to check each doubt. But each new doubt yields further digital doubts, and so on, until the entire earth is converted to computronium. Except for the million paper clips.

Bostrom does not believe that the paper-clip maximizer will come to be, exactly; its a thought experiment, one designed to show how even careful system design can fail to restrain extreme machine intelligence. But he does believe that superintelligence could emerge, and while it could be great, he thinks it could also decide it doesnt need humans around. Or do any number of other things that destroy the world. The title of chapter 8 is: Is the default outcome doom?

If this sounds absurd to you, youre not alone. Critics such as the robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks say that people who fear a runaway AI misunderstand what computers are doing when we say theyre thinking or getting smart. From this perspective, the putative superintelligence Bostrom describes is far in the future and perhaps impossible.

Yet a lot of smart, thoughtful people agree with Bostrom and are worried now. Why?

Volition

The question Can a machine think? has shadowed computer science from its beginnings. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that a machine could be taught like a child; John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term artificial intelligence in 1955. As AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began to use computers to recognize images, translate between languages, and understand instructions in normal language and not just code, the idea that computers would eventually develop the ability to speak and thinkand thus to do evilbubbled into mainstream culture. Even beyond the oft-referenced HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project featured a large blinking mainframe computer that brings the world to the brink of nuclear destruction; a similar theme was explored 13 years later in WarGames. The androids of 1973s Westworld went crazy and started killing.

Extreme AI predictions are comparable to seeing more efficient internal combustion engines and jumping to the conclusion that the warp drives are just around the corner, Rodney Brooks writes.

More here:

Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence