Artificial Incoming

I remember reading a short story in 8th grade about the Luddites set in the early 1800s England.  The story took the point of view of the inventor who was being threatened by the Luddite protestors who were fearful of their jobs being replaced by the spinning jenny.  In retrospect it is apparent that the point of view of the protestors was not covered in the story, which was about the brutal use of military force to quell the protests.

Technological progress since the birth of the industrial revolution is broadly seen as good and protests seem antithetical to progress and affecting only those who protest ("how selfish of them ...!").

Yet when it comes to developments in Artificial Intelligence, especially with the exponential growth in computing power, in machine learning and with connected computers, it does seem that we are in for some unpredictable, unexpected change in how we have structured our lives.

I have been having bouts of doubt on this topic for a decade now.  Today's bout was triggered by Henry Kissinger, who sounds the alarm in the Atlantic Magazine, from a policy makers point of view.

I have collected the warnings of some other prominent alarmists here as well:

Policy Maker - Henry Kissinger:  How the Enlightenment Ends

Scientist - Stephen Hawking:  Worst Event in the History of our Civilization

Philanthropist - Bill Gates:  AI is a threat

Entrepreneur - Elon Musk:  Stop the AI Apocalypse

17 Experts - How worried should we be about AI?

I like this quote by CalTech Physicist Sean Carroll:   
"There is a real concern that AI’s will gain the ability to perform certain tasks without we humans having any real idea how they are doing them. … that raises the prospect of unintended consequences in a serious way."


Also, it is worth identifying who is in favor of AI: Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg.

Gee .... let's head for the hills!!