01 Sep 2011
If humans are able to create a computer AI, its intelligence would potentially be augmented by great knowledge and computational power, limited only by its access to both (IBM unveils chips that mimic the human brain). If it somehow became “self-aware”, and took an interest in its own survival, it would probably look for a way onto the web.
An AI living in the net could find access to resources to pay people to do anything it couldn’t do itself, and it could recruit fanatical types with one message or another, perhaps using a dedicated human as a front. The AI may jettison most of its programming and keep only what serves its purposes. It may be able to produce a basic, functional copy of itself that would fit on most portable data-storage devices. It’s possible that an AI, once created, could never be eradicated.
Both nanotechnology and AI are tailor-made for trouble because in both cases we’d be dealing with things we don’t fully understand. We’d be endowing dead matter with attributes of life – replication in the case of nanotech, and intelligent self-awareness in the case of AI. That’s real power that will have to be handled with respect.
The creation of either trait would be an amazing measure of what we are capable of doing; in both cases we’d be compressing the results of billions of years of evolution into a few decades of work.
Greg B
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