Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Pedro Domingos so memorably put it, “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”

I think the most worrisome aspect of AI systems in the short term is that we will give them too much autonomy without being fully aware of their limitations and vulnerabilities. We tend to anthropomorphize AI systems: we impute human qualities to them and end up overestimating the extent to which these systems can actually be fully trusted.

General intelligence isn’t about the number of abilities, but about the integration between those abilities.

We should be afraid. Not of intelligent machines. But of machines making decisions that they do not have the intelligence to make. I am far more afraid of machine stupidity than of machine intelligence. Machine stupidity creates a tail risk. Machines can make many many good decisions and then one day fail spectacularly on a tail event that did not