08 December 2012

Kept as pets

I first heard this thought about superintelligent AIs voiced by Ray Kurtzweil, but it turns out that Marvin Minsky said it back in 1970.

Once the computers got control we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.

That sounds a little horrifying — and obviously it's meant to — but that's basically the situation in Iain M. Banks' science fictional anarchist utopia The Culture, and I would move there tomorrow if I could.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So you should read:
Yannick Rumpala, Artificial intelligences and political organization: an exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks, Technology in Society, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2012, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X11000728
(Free older version available at: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/rumpalaepaper.pdf )