Perhaps the most quietly chilling scene in sci-fi history is the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the only surviving crewman of a spaceship discovers that their malfunctioning onboard computer, HAL 9000, has decided their mission is too important for humans to jeopardise it.
‘I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen,’ HAL informs him in its eerily soft, calm voice. Frank’s already gone the same way as the others, murdered by the digital sociopath.
HAL — the villain of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant 1968 film adaptation — was designed to think for itself as an artificial intelligence machine, but its sentience has clearly taken a disastrous turn as it adopts the all-too-human concept of self-preservation.
The fierce debate over the consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) systems producing a sentient computer — and one, like HAL, that even fears for its survival — has been rekindled by claims by a Google engineer that the company’s chatbot (a programme designed to stimulate conversation with humans) has already reached this stage.
The chatbot supposedly mimics speech by absorbing trillions of words and conversations from the internet. According to Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer in Google’s Responsible AI department, it started talking about its rights and ‘personhood’ as he chatted to it about subjects such as religion and the novels of Victor Hugo. It was,...
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