In James Cameron’s The Terminator, a cyborg travels from 2029 to 1984 to kill a woman whose son will one day lead humanity in a post-apocalyptic war against AI controlled machines. A new scientific study has concluded that not only is such a scenario possible, machines deciding to take over the world that is, the fact is we wouldn’t be able to stop it. How cheerful! 
Machine learning and its impact on humans has been a concern for scientists for decades. Professor Stephen Hawking once said that a major technological disaster will threaten humans in the next 1,000 – 10,000 years. If Professor Hawking was still alive, he might revise his forecast. AI research has advanced rapidly in recent years. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk declared AI to be our biggest existential threat and likened it to “summoning the demon.” I interviewed NASA’s Dr. Richie Terrile on The Richie Allen Show a few years ago. Terrile said that while he believed that machines would become self aware and move beyond our control, they wouldn’t necessarily wipe us out. When I asked him why, he said that they’d probably leave Earth and go exploring the universe. Fingers crossed eh?
This latest study, by an international team of researchers, including scientists from the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, concludes that “no single algorithm can find a solution for determining whether an AI would produce harm to the world.” And worryingly it states that, “we may not even know when super-intelligent machines have arrived, because deciding whether a machine exhibits intelligence superior to humans is in the same realm as the containment problem.”
I watched Cameron’s Terminator recently and I was struck by something.
In the parts of the film that take place in 2029, armed drones patrol the skies, looking for people to vaporise. Last May, my future father in-law, phoned from his home in Nancy, in the North East of France. He was startled as were his neighbours, to encounter drones which bore a striking resemblance to Cameron’s machines, flying around the village. The drones had been programmed to tell people to go home, to vacate the streets and to obey the curfew! The drones weren’t armed, but they had been adapted to carry weapons if the need ever arose. When I looked into it, I discovered that in some instances (but not all), the drones were being instructed not by a police officer, but by an AI computer. Science fiction eh?
It’s not just the obvious physical threat of robots. There is also the human environment threat such as the one HAL (of 2001: A Space Odyssey) represented. Additionally, there is an old X-Files episode that addressed the idea of a ‘smart house’ AI killing the inhabitants; an Elementary episode that looked at how the computer of a self-drive ‘smart car’ was hacked to kill the occupants; and, of course, there is the war between Man and Machine (that the machines won) that precipitated The Matrix storyline.
These are but a few. Unfortunately, most people who enjoy the story see only fiction and dismiss the reality that underpins it – making it so much harder (and usually impossible) for the rest of us to get through to them the very real dangers.
Maybe that is why it is so hard to get people to see the current Covid manipulations: over the last decade or so, the ‘viral outbreak’ storylines have inundated popular consciousness (Umbrella Corporation, in particular).
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i tend to watch too many AI movies! watched this one again recently, check out Boston Dynamics development and their Atlas! i can see them shouting “citizen! please wear your mask!” or one of those creepy as fook robot dogs they have! in a very very near future!
Slick new site Richie!
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I know a Sean Connor.. not to familiar with a John Connor..is that any good
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Some of my favourite films from being a kid, unfortunately this is a very real threat to our existence, considering in the next decade or two real AI will be born and the fact that they planning Robocops and Robo military personnel.
Let’s hope they don’t make them look as evil as in the film ey?
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I saw those very same type of drones flying around Milton Keynes some years ago. This would have been 5-10 years ago. I know people would laugh at Milton Keynes having these drones, but it’s very close to Cranfield University, which is well known for it’s involvement in technology!
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I saw a robot dog as I drove through Milton Keynes about 18 months ago ????
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Great article haven’t watched the film since it was out on video about time for a national re-run. I’m enjoying this website already ????✌️❤️
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Liking the new website pal!
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Nostradamus ain’t got nothing on my boy Phillip K. Dick! Great article Richie. I hope your show dives deep into PKD in 2021. Each passing day, I feel his strange story/life is more and more relevant.
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I love me some PKD!
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Great introduction to a great looking site
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