Don’t forget that the online information sphere is just as much designed to conceal information as it is to reveal it. It’s designed to cocoon us. Don’t let yourself get duped. Fight to understand how your world really works.

La guerre (des drones), quelle connerie !

Terminator Ethics : faut-il interdire les « robots tueurs » ?

It is possible to agree that AI may pose an existential threat to humanity, but without ever having to imagine that it will become more intelligent than us.

One need not dig into subtext to find the central message of the movies. It is John Connor’s message to himself, given to his father, passed on to his mother, and then repeated to himself, and by extension to us: ‘The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.’ And it’s the meaning and grounding of this thought that I’m going to explore.

So who’s going to protect us from the real-life rise of the machines? Step forward a little-known body called the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). CSER is based at the University of Cambridge, and is a multidisciplinary group of individuals – mainly scientists – whose mission, as defined on their website, is “the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction”.CSER was set up with funding from Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, which arguably makes him the real-life John Connor, making a lone stand against the real-life Skynets.

Artificial intelligence: Friendly or frightening?

THE FUTURE OF AI IS A COIN FLIP: IMMORTALITY OR HUMAN EXTINCTION?

I think one disappointing thing about the Terminator franchise is that I often feel as though it’s cooked up by people who have no background in science. In order to always up the ante and make the system more frightening and powerful, they go completely off the deep end until it’s not credible at all. Then, it’s just disappointing for people who’d really like to find it provocative, and stimulating, and scary.

I think robots are going to have a huge impact on the world, just like computers did, or cars did, or asphalt, or electricity. That scale of impact—enormous impact—but I don’t think the impact is going to be because they become evil and take over. I think it’s going to be just because everything we do changes. Some things get easier, some things will get harder—not many things—and society will change. That’s a lot more scary, in some ways.