I was getting a lift with a friend—Greg Skau—just the other day. No not in his boat, but in his car.

Our conversation turned to the topic of: “is AI a threat to all of us?” Indeed. See this:

The year is 2050. The location is London— but not as we know it. GodBot, a robot so intelligent it can out-smart any human, is in charge of the United Kingdom — the entire planet, in fact — and just announced its latest plan to reverse global temperature rises: an international zero-child, zero-reproduction policy, which will see all human females systematically destroyed and replaced with carbon-neutral sex robots.

That my friend Greg would raise questions about AI seemed pretty neat. It seemed natural yet quite cool that a friend—who was not an AI expert—would raise these issues. I am also not an AI expert—not even an advanced beginner. But it is on just about everyone’s top list of questions. We had a fun conversation, but failed to resolve the issue. Of course.

AI Limits

OpenAI has just revealed that ChatGPT-4 has learned to lie, telling a human it was a blind person in order to get a task done. Somehow lies seem to set such AI systems apart from what we might have thought were the limits of AI.

Another thought on AI is: Is physical law an Alien Intelligence?:

Arthur Clarke once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

This is related to Clarke’s three laws:

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Or take a look at his T-shirt (referring to this):

Open Problems

Alan Perlis—the first Turing award winner—is famous for his many quotes. One was: “A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.”

I enjoyed working for Alan at my first job at Yale University, many years ago. See Fortnow’s blog for comments on our joint work with Perlis and Rich DeMillo—Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs.

Ken pipes in that the record seems to indicate that this late-1970s quote reflected frustration during the long “AI winter” when basic human capabilities stayed beyond reach. He also notes that the 2050 date for sex robots was forecast by the British chess master who was previously best known for winning a famous computer bet in 1978.