RORSCHACH
I don’t fear artificial intelligence, I fear people who fear artificial intelligence.
It’s the 1960s. A psychologist stares at his patient — a balding, middle-aged foreman with a cigarette in his hand, and a curl of smoke around him like a halo on an acid trip. The psychologist holds up an inkblot, an ambiguous, black splatter on a white flashcard, and asks his patient what he sees. The thinking is his patient, not willing or otherwise able to express his feelings, his thoughts, his motivations, might inadvertently reveal some piece of his inner self while describing the ambiguous. The foreman doesn’t see a nondescript swiggle, or stain. He sees a man and woman making love, perhaps violently. He sees a mother holding her child. He sees a grisly murder. While the descriptions of these inkblots reveal very little about the world, they reveal a great deal about the man describing them, because when faced with an inscrutable abstract he projects himself onto the ambiguous.
Let’s look at this in the context of artificial intelligence. I’m not talking about self-driving cars, or algorithms serving ads for wallpaper and nice leather boots on Gmail. I’m not talking about the stuff we call artificial intelligence to raise money from bewildered venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road. I’m talking about general artificial intelligence, which is a computer that wants stuff, and chiefly to live. I’m talking about…
