Were it not for my age, I’d be worried, but I couldn’t give a flying you-know-what at this stage of the game. Mind you, I have two children, a daughter and a son, both in their early 40s, and four grandchildren, two boys and two girls, some still in diapers—that does keep me up at night.
It should also worry anyone whose brain hasn’t been fried by too many hamburgers, asinine TV commercials, or Hollywood tripe, especially when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks glowingly about artificial intelligence and his company’s ambition to turn us all into zombies.
Here it is in a nutshell: will computers kill us all or help us live forever? The canonical worry is that it is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to ensure that any artificial general intelligence (AI) we create will be aligned with human values.
Zombie tech chiefs like Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Google’s Larry Page insist that AI will be able to invent novel means of capturing carbon from the atmosphere, storing energy in batteries, curing cancer, and making us all attractive. (In Zuckerberg’s case, I am skeptical of this last claim.) The rising prowess of AI even has the Sammy Glicks of Hollywood worried. Soon it will be able to replicate actors, produce screenplays, and substitute the sex appeal of such beauties as Lily James and Keira Knightly.