A.I.'s Horrible Ending

Stephen Hawking recently said that it would be a big mistake if humanity created artificial intelligence.  There seems to be a lot of technologists concerned about the effect of possible future science. It seemed to start with Bill Joy's infamous essay on nanotechnology.

I can understand where they're coming from. When you think about how we've abused everything from internal combustion to high-fructose corn syrup, it becomes scary to even contemplate what we would do with self-replicating nanomachines.

But there is a flip-side to that line of reasoning: because we abuse every technology we create, we can't stop now. We don't use technology responsibly or with restraint, so we need to keep inventing new things to clean up our past messes.

To look at it another way, we often laugh at past alarmists, like Malthus or the  folks who said we'd have so many horses that today's world would be awash in manure. But they weren't wrong, they just didn't see new technologies coming. Without improved farming techniques, we wouldn't be able to feed the world (the part we do currently feed) and without the car, the world really would smell a whole lot worse.

So if you're going to advise us to avoid future technologies, you'll also have to prescribe a great shift in how we use our current technology.  Standing still with the world we've got now simply isn't an option.  I realize it may seem reckless to continue our current "strategy" of ignoring the consequences and assuming we can invent our way out of any problems we get ourselves into.  But until you can talk humanity into a new level of maturity, it's all we've got.