Superintelligence—10 years later

For the most part, members of the dystopian camp aren’t worried about the AI takeover as imagined in films like the Terminator series, with human-like robots “turning evil” and hunting down people in a power-hungry conquest of humanity. Superintelligence would be the product of human creation, not natural evolution, and thus wouldn’t have the same

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Not everyone, however, is so optimistic. Elon Musk has called superintelligence “the biggest risk we face as a civilization,” comparing the creation of it to “summoning the demon.” Intellectual celebrities such as the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking have joined Musk in the dystopian camp, many of them inspired by the work of Oxford philosopher…

Som

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The fear is that if human beings presented an obstacle to achieving one of those goals—reverse global warming, for example—a superintelligent agent could easily, even accidentally, wipe us off the face of the earth. For a computer program whose intellectual imagination so dwarfed our own, this wouldn’t require anything as crude as gun-toting robots

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Since the 1950s, discussions about AI have largely revolved around a big, tantalizing question: What can machines do, and where might they hit a wall? Will they ever truly think, understand, or maybe even become conscious? Could they reach the so-called “heights of human intelligence”? And then there’s that shadowy question looming in the backgroun

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