Member-only story
AI Will Neither Save Us Nor Destroy Us
Why algorithms will never be sentient, moral, evil, or even just plain dull at parties
With our little ape-brains as our only mechanism for occasionally attempting the arduous task of thinking, it’s not surprising that nearly everything we believe and imagine is wildly wrong. This is because, lacking cognitive apparatus of sufficient capability, we automatically simplify reality, boiling it down until the residue is sufficiently tiny that we can almost encompass it. As may be expected, however, in this process of gross simplification much of importance is lost.
Today it appears fashionable to worry about the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. Some people who really ought to have known better but are too addicted to seeing their views in print have opined that AI is the greatest threat facing humanity. Which is akin to saying that, faced with the Mongol invasion, plague, and famine, the greatest threat to Europe in 1279 was a small boy named Gaston who was in possession of a toy catapult.
Let’s begin by asking: what is AI?
Simply put, all artificial intelligence programs are algorithms. That is, they are mathematical formulations written in one or more programming languages that create structures capable of performing prodigious feats of…
