Don’t Worry about Superintelligence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55613/jeet.v26i1.52Abstract
This paper responds to Nick Bostrom’s suggestion that the threat of a human-unfriendly superintelligence should lead us to delay or rethink progress in AI. I allow that progress in AI presents problems that we are currently unable to solve. However, we should distinguish between currently unsolved problems for which there are rational expectations of solutions and currently unsolved problems for which no such expectation is appropriate. The problem of a human-unfriendly superintelligence belongs to the first category. It is rational to proceed on that assumption that we will solve it. These observations do not reduce to zero the existential threat from superintelligence. But we should not permit fear of very improbable negative outcomes to delay the arrival of the expected benefits from AI.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Nicholas Agar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) after publication, while providing bibliographic details that credit JEET (See The Effect of Open Access).
How to Cite
