artificial intelligence and the future (updated)

Update, 5th of August 2009:

• This issue has already been adressed by the Chaos Computer Club in the talk “Beyond Asimov – Laws for Robots” in December 2008.
• TimesOnline reports about the conference as well, with the rather dramatic headline “Scientists fear a revolt by Killer Robots”.

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Over 30 years ago, the world’s leading biologists held a conference at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California to discuss the recent developments in biotechnological sciences regarding genetical engineering, and agreed to some ethical standards enabling experimentation to continue.

A very similar type of congress was held in February 2009, again at Asilomar – this time organised by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

NYTimes.com reports:

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists [...] generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They were mostly concerned about criminals abusing modern technology, and discussed the idea if artificial intelligence could arise without being programmed by humans.

As Dr. Horvitz, president of the AAAI and researcher at Microsoft put it:

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years. Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”
“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines.”

The concern, or actually more the idea of the point of time when computers would outpass humans in their intelligence has been widely discussed for over 50 years now; one of the most famous current authors is the futurist Raymond Kurzweil, who refers to this phenomenon as “singularity” (as many did before him).