Intelligent Design

Artificial intelligence will not spell the demise of the human species, according to a man who is paid to research and develop artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking speculated last month that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race"; and the co-founder of PayPal, who apparently has never heard of climate change, nuclear weapons, the free market or patriotism, proclaimed last year that artificial intelligence was the greatest existential threat to humanity. Such pulp-SF crudities lack the vision even of Isaac Asimov's 1950s robot stories, in which the robots are manufactured with built-in safeguards (which do not prevent them going rather inventively wrong). A more nuanced view is offered in various works by Stanislaw Lem. In "The Washing Machine Tragedy" an artificial intelligence isolates itself in the Crab Nebula and asks to be left alone, which predictably results in constant pestering and endless legal complications. The eponymous supercomputer in GOLEM XIV does its best to direct human beings towards a more modest perspective on themselves before closing itself off from all communication, except possibly with another supercomputer called HONEST ANNIE. Most encouraging of all, in "Doctor Diagoras" an inventor succeeds in creating a genuinely alien intelligence which, far from wishing to destroy him, actually finds him rather useful.