John Markoff, writing for The New York Times, reports on the discovery of a long lost paper by M.I.T mathematician Norbert Wiener. Written more than sixty years ago, the final paragraphs of the paper resonate loud and clear as we now flirt with the realities of artificial intelligence and, one hopes, consider carefully what it is we wish for from our machines.
“Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.”
See full article here.
