The Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to imbue robots with the ability to both replicate themselves and to increase the rate at which they get smarter leading to a tipping point or ‘technological singularity’ when they can outsmart humans. In this chapter I will argue that Hawking is essentially correct to flag up an existential danger surrounding widespread deployment of ‘autonomous machines’, but wrong to be so concerned about the singularity, wherein advances in AI effectively makes the human race redundant; in my world AI with humans in the loop may yet be a force for good. 1 Background: the ‘technological’ singularity It is not often that you are obliged to proclaim a much-loved international genius wrong, but in his alarming prediction regarding Artificial Intelligence and the future of humankind, I believe Professor Stephen Hawking is. Well, to be precise, being a theoretical physicist in an echo of Schrdinger’s cat, famously both dead and alive at the same time I believe the eminent Professor is both wrong and right at the same time1. Wrong because there are strong grounds for believing that computers will never be able to replicate all human cognitive faculties and right because even such emasculated machines may still pose a threat to mankind’s future existence; an existential threat, so to speak. In a television interview on December 2nd 2014 Rory Cellan-Jones asked how far engineers had come along the path towards creating artificial intelligence to which, slightly alarmingly, Professor Hawking replied “Once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. J. Mark Bishop Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, e-mail: [email protected] 1 This chapter extends a brief essay first published in Scientia Salon March 2015.