This
week’s Nature has a section on ethical
aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence. Reading this article, the
associated comments, and the accompanying special section on Machine
Intelligence in this week’s issue, has left me deeply concerned. The
accelerating capabilities of both individual intelligent machines and the
Internet itself raise all sorts of questions about whether human beings will be
better off or not if artificial intelligence continues to evolve in its current
uncontrolled fashion. It seems we need a
measured assessment of both the potentials and hazards of this thrust before we
proceed much further. Clearly it is always difficult to accurately anticipate
the path of an emerging technology and to create guidelines concerning its
development and implementation. Nonetheless society has done this previously in
the context of other transformative technologies such as nuclear weapons and
genetic engineering. Although there is plenty of hype in the media, it surprises
me how little the issue of Artificial Intelligence has been addressed by
ethicists or by governmental bodies.
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