Artificial Intelligence: To fear or not to fear? 22/June/2015

Although a fear of artificial minds has a long history as a literary trope, its expression has recently moved from science fiction to science fact. With such scientific and technology luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk warning us that artificial intelligence poses the greatest existential threat to humanity the world has ever seen, AI-phobia has more credibility than ever before. On the other hand, high-profile researchers such as Microsoft’s Eric Horvitz reassure us that AI does not pose a threat. What should we think? What should we do? Or is the debate about matters so far in the future that it makes little sense to worry about them now? I’ll argue that a healthy dose of fear about the near-future (and present!) is in fact warranted, though perhaps not for the reasons that have attracted the headlines. I’ll also attempt to provide a proper understanding of the issues that can keep our fears in check — so they don’t make matters even worse.

Ron Chrisley received a Bachelors of Science in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University in 1987, with honours and distinction. He was an AI research assistant at Stanford, NASA-Ames, and Xerox PARC, and investigated neural networks for speech recognition as a Fulbright Scholar at the Helsinki University of Technology and at ATR Laboratories in Japan. In 1997 he received a DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and in 1992 he took up a lectureship in Philosophy in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex. From 2001-2003 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Since 2003 he has been the director of the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS) at the University of Sussex, where he is also on the faculty of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science.