People love a mystery, especially a scary one, and the media's making AI a scary mystery. Let's take the mystery out, if not quite the scary.
Machines are no threat. We're well used to ones that open doors, till the soil, put bridges in place, move us across the land, fly past Jupiter, take us under the ocean, report bank balances, wash and dry dishes, play chess and read us a book. We live with them all.
But now they are working flat out on producing machines that can walk and talk and look like us and are intelligent like us. 'They' are not going to stop. How long have we got?
Certainly our species, said by us to be a higher form by virtue of its intelligence, may meet its end someday. But how could evolution, which is random, end at a kind
of apex that humans would endorse or even recognise? An oyster, presumably, is
untroubled that oysters over their long years never built Paris; Parisians will shortly have software that translates Mandarin in real time. Evolution may or may not 'progress' in our terms, but the terms are strictly ours.
We must guard against anthropocentrism. The Universe, we found out quite recently, is a very big place. How could we know higher forms and more advanced societies didn’t survive for millions of years before we and our intelligence came along? Or whether they are still around?
And then, quite apart from WWIII finishing us off, we're maybe approaching the point where we're able to meddle with evolution
itself. That could also be the end of us humans. 'With the advent of artificial life,' wrote Doyne Farmer in Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution, 'we may
be the first creatures to create our own successors.'
But in that event how would we tell?
Stay calm. Carry on. Like everything else, we're going to have to live with AI in the here and now.
