Earlier today I posted a piece by Stephen Hawking on the dangers of artificial intelligence (more or less, it may be the last thing humans ever have a chance to create). Hawking frets over the sort of transcendent AI imagined by advocates like Ray Kurzweil. But Steven Omohundro suggests a different danger: that robots are by design anti-social and narrow-minded. In Omohundro's view, AI poses the danger not of a runaway super-intelligence, but of a ruthlessly efficient, intelligent machine focused on a few tasks unrestrained by conscience or compassion, law and order, or even peer pressure. If this seems less dangerous, think again.
-- RDM
