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AI FEAR AND LOATHING
Artificial Intelligence Is Our Salvation and Our Doom
It’s going to be a bumpy ride
This morning I watched a robot do something I had done myself just minutes earlier. It was a simple thing, at least for me: position a coffee cup under our Keurig, lift the lid to insert a coffee pod, and push the start bottom.
What’s fascinating in the scary sense is that the robot learned how to do this by watching humans do it. What’s a little comforting — but only a little — is that it required ten hours of watching. A fairly young child could learn this with one demonstration and probably with nothing more than verbal instructions, so chefs and other kitchen workers don’t need to panic yet.
Yet is another scary word because the potential in manufacturing for self adapting assembly is enormous. Enormous and uncomfortable.
Though the child would likely know about covers of different kinds; covers with and without hinges, friction based covers, latched, screwed down, and more. The child probably would understand if the water basin needed filling. I doubt this robot approaches that level — yet.
