Artificial Intelligence

Jaan Tallinn argues that evolution has outsmarted itself by creating intelligent species actually smart enough to understand and control it.  Now, with the increasing possibility of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, humanity, Tallinn argues, is about to commit a similar blunder.

Skype's founding programmer and A.I philosopher at Cambridge University Jaan Tallinn explains how A.I is taking over from evolution.  Talinn, a philosopher of modern technology, believes the impact of artificial intelligence has reached a crucial threshold.

The Estonian-born Tallinn is a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation an organization with the tagline "safeguarding humanity" and at university he majored in theoretical physics. 

"Evolution actually made a sort of mistake in a sense that it actually created primates with optimisation ability and that optimisation ability got powerful enough to actually understand evolution. It actually created something that was more powerful than itself."

Tallinn's point is that humans are on the verge of potentially repeating that mistake. "I’m giving about 50 per cent probability of this thing (technological singularity) happening this century," he said. "If this thing is going to be really slow, then people have time to turn this thing into policy and then because this is a really contentious issue, it might end up doing a lot of damage," he said.

He also warns of the dangers of only seeing AI as Hollywood's humanoid robots. "I mean intelligence is really about planning and protection and you don’t really need arms and legs to do that. For example, Google is a very famous application of AI."




SOURCE  World News Australia

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