Have the machines taken over?

Published Oct 13 2008, 10:00 AM by Ian Donnis

During my recent Q+A with RISD president John Maeda, I mentioned how some futurists associate apocalyptic scenarios with "the singularity" -- the time when artificial intelligence accelerates past its human counterpart. Here's what Maeda said.

That’s why I came to RISD, actually. I mean, yes, if you look at the future of technology, yes, you’re going to put something in your brain. It’s going to do everything for you. You’re not going to think anymore. That’s what’s going to happen if someone wants it to happen. When it happens, what’s going to happen?

Not too cool, I think. So by coming here, knowing what’s coming in the future, I hope, will prevent what’s coming — which is basically the dehumanization of the entire world, which I don’t like, actually. It’s a bad idea, I think. So here, we will figure out a different role for technology that is understood by humans, for humans’ sake.

With an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, Richard Dooling said we might already be too far along.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can’t help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers’ apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — “derive” — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?