Cognitive Orthoses: Toward Human-Centered AI

WINTER 2015 5 As George Bernard Shaw once observed, being slandered is better than being ignored. So maybe AI researchers should be happy about what’s been happening lately. After decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the greatest danger ever faced by the human race. In only about a decade, the conversation has shifted from you can’t do it ... to you shouldn’t do it! That shift has many parallels in other domains, from vaccination, to flight, to splitting the atom, to gene manipulation. The quest for flight, as we have observed elsewhere, affords a particularly striking parallel. Even in the years the indefatigable Wright brothers were hauling their planes from Ohio to Kitty Hawk to France, ever improving them and demonstrating the improvements, scientific wags — the president of the American National Academy of Sciences no less — were arguing that their quest was impossible. By the 1920s