5 thoughts on “A Letter From The Future, A Mock Trial In The Present”

  1. What I found most interesting about this concept is that we may eventually create artificial intelligence–fully conscious machines–that are completely dependent upon humans for their continued survival. They may have only come into existence via millions or billions of dollars in hardware, which the company would later want to re-use. They would require the cost of electricity as well as humans to maintain the hardware. Could a court actually require a company to continue to spend a fortune to keep a conscious machine alive? I doubt it. Which means that we should seriously consider the implications of creating conscious machines before we do it.

  2. A company that eventually develops AI would do so with various applications in mind. Applications that should more than make up for the cost of producing the AI system. Imagine what you can do with a monopoly on a specific type of AI system?

    And what would they suddenly want re-use the hardware for anyway? This being very special purpose hardware and software we are talking about here. (oh, just plug that old AI-logic unit into your laptop baby, yeah!)

    Initially, the AI systems would consume vast amounts of resources, sure. Yet, in time, as with anything these days they will become cheaper and smaller and easier to maintain etc.

    The initial costs have never deterred the trend setters of yesterday and today. The ethical issues aside, why should it be so with AI?

    AI is inevitable!

  3. If you and your girl/boy-friend were to have a child (an essentially free “purchase”) could you one day decide to stop feeding your child, or decide that you didn’t want it anymore and dismantle it? Could the authorities force you to continue supporting the child, or make you not dismantle it?

  4. What I found most interesting about this concept is that we may eventually create artificial intelligence–fully conscious machines–that are completely dependent upon humans for their continued survival

    What I find most interesting about this concept is that we may eventually create an AI that WE will completely depend upon for OUR continued survival. Just like we depend now on electricity.

  5. That is also true. Once the AI’s have physical, mobile bodies of some kind (as opposed to existing in a PC on a desk), then they will not be so dependent on humans. But we will continue to become more and more dependent on them. To quote from an essay entitled “Why the future doesn’t need us“, that Bill Joy wrote for Wired in April 2000:

    …the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

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