Be very afraid: who should be worrying most about artificial intelligence?
The rise of the machines is upending the labour market and threatening to render all sorts of workers redundant, writes Stéphane Garelli
Everybody has been a little anxious about the subject since Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein in 1818. But the idea takes on a far deeper meaning when a renowned scientist like Stephen Hawking says in an interview on the BBC: "The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of human race … humans who are limited by slow biological evolution could not compete, and would be superseded." The subject rose to prominence with a seminal paper by Alan Turing in 1950, which opened with the following sentence: "I propose to consider the question: can machines think?" During the summer of 1956, a group of scientists — including Herbert Simon and John Nash, two future Nobel laureates — met at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They devised the term artificial intelligence, and tried to build a machine that could mimic how the human brain functions. They failed. To be fair, given the technological and computing advancements at the time, a top-down approach to reproduc...
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