AI & the Faustian Bargain with Technological Change – A. C. Grayling

We have made a ‘Faustian contract’ with technological change – but are the risks as they stand enough reason to halt technological progress?
AC Grayling weighs in on progress in Artificial Intelligence – risks & opportunities – this is the first time he has publicly discussed the issues he does in this interview.

“When we contemplate what we could use our technologies to do, if we thought that it would be very desirable that they should produce… just pleasure, just distraction, entertainment… taking away from us some of the things that make us do art, or write novels, or think again about the human condition and human values and human possibility – I think that would probably be a bad thing.”

“I think the thing that is going to change everything is machine learning; is artificial intelligence and robotics…this is an enormous dogs leg in human history in a way that the intelligence systems can teach themselves, can become even smarter than they are already.”

Points covered:

• Machine Learning seems poised to change everything
• Automation & Unemployment (and education not just for work, but to ‘make a noble use of ones time’)
• An intelligence explosion of self-improving AI (and it’s implications)
• AI & the Faustian Bargain of Technological Change
• The mug’s game of trying to predict the singularity
• AI and the likelihood of it helping eliminate disease and aging
• The challenge of beneficial artificial intelligence
• Increasing the odds of achieving friendly AI
• Dealing with Uncertainty
• Indomitable human curiosity

“I rather expect actually, that there will be some kind of ‘singularity’ – that there will come a point where.. just the sheer exponentiality of the increase of computational power, of what systems can teach themselves, how they can reprogram themselves – there is something to consider there. And so part of what we consider will be – is there anything that we could put in case that would constrain it? I mean after all technology has already taught us some rather anxiety provoking lessons…”

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