Evil Robots, Killer Computers, and Other Myths: The Truth About AI and the Future of Humanity

"There are a lot of AI hype books. I didn’t include any of those in my list. They’ve been driving me bananas for decades. Then, there are a bunch of generally less popular myth-buster books. This is my favorite one. There’s one in French that’s called L’Intelligence artificielle n’existe pas . I thought that was hilarious. This book, I think, does a great job. It’s not just a mythbuster; it’s a general introduction for newcomers, lay readers, and business readers with any background to understand, and put perspective on the hype and the overpromises. Of the mythbuster books—of which there are a dozen or so that I’m aware of—this is the one I like best. Yes, and I say the same thing. AGI is where the computer can do anything a person can do and we basically have virtual humans. I believe that’s either a ghost story or a fairy tale, depending on whether you’re being a doomer or a utopian. It’s the novel Mary Shelley would have written if she knew about algorithms. The computer is not going to come alive. The fact that it’s getting better does not mean it’s taking concrete, proven steps towards general human-level capabilities. These days it’s a lot more seemingly human-like in certain ways which are astounding, but there’s no reason to think that it’s actually approaching human-level capabilities in general, or that it’s going to get a volition of its own. Yes. He’s not the only one to say that, because there are grave concerns. I’ve published a dozen or so op-eds myself (in the San Francisco Chronicle , the Scientific American blog, and other places) about those concerns. They come up in my second to last choice, The Rise of Big Data Policing , which is about the ethical issues and responsible machine learning. Whether you’re saying AI is so powerful that it’s going to kill everybody, or put everyone out of work, or that it’s going to make a utopian society because it does everything for us, any of those stories serves the same thing. It’s hype, or criti-hype (a term somebody coined) that’s trying to almost deify it. In general, the hype just serves to increase valuations and stock prices. It certainly does distract from the real, concrete problems that we could have in machine learning deployment, but it’s mostly meant to oversell. I don’t mean that it’s all just cynical—I think a lot of people genuinely believe it. It becomes almost a religious belief. It has certainly been exaggerated: that’s part of the hype. Automation—which is what computers do in general—and optimization are going to make things more efficient and going to change the job market. We’ve been through those shifts many times before in history. It’s important for communities and businesses and governments to help individuals adapt to those changes, but it’s not going to wholesale replace white-collar jobs. It’s a tool that helps with tasks—it’s not like an employee who you can hire and onboard and set off on their own, like you would with a human."