The creators of artificially intelligent machines are often depicted in popular fiction as myopic Dr. Frankensteins who are oblivious to the apocalyptic technologies they unleash upon the world. In real life, they tend to wring their hands over the big questions: good versus evil and the impact the coming wave of robots and machine brains will have on human workers.

Scientists, recognizing their work is breaking out of the research lab and into the real world, grappled during a daylong summit on Dec. 10 in Montreal with such ethical issues as how to prevent computers that are smarter than humans from putting people out of work, adding complications to legal proceedings, or, even worse, seeking to harm society. Today’s AI can learn how to play video games, help automate e-mail responses, and drive cars under certain conditions. That’s already provoked concerns about the effect it may have workers.

"I think the biggest challenge is the challenge to employment," said Andrew Ng, the chief scientist for Chinese search engine Baidu Inc., which announced last week that one of its cars had driven itself on a 30 kilometer (19 mile) route around Beijing with no human required. The speed with which AI advances may change the workplace means "huge numbers of people in their 20s and 40s and 50s" would need to be retrained in a way that’s never happened before, he said.

 

David Fuller's view

This is a fascinating subject and we don’t need to be scientists or computer specialists to figure out what is going to happen.  Once our species creates super intelligence, and that is the course we are on, we will be redundant.

Read: Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat. Highly recommended.  Nick Bostram’s Superintelligence is also good.