Guest editorial

• Published in: Foresight (Cambridge) Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 1 - 3
• Main Authors: Häggström, Olle, Rhodes, Catherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford Emerald Group Publishing Limited 01-01-2019
• Subjects: Academic disciplines; Artificial intelligence; Catastrophes; Decision making; Disasters; Famine; Intelligence; Pearce, Andrew; Sweden
• ISSN: 1463-6689; 1465-9832
• DOI: 10.1108/FS-03-2019-108

[...]David Denkenberger, Joshua Pearce, Andrew Ray Taylor and Ryan Black deal with a range of catastrophes that can lead to nuclear winter-type scenarios where sunlight is blocked over a substantial period and lead to global food shortage and famine, and the life-saving potential and cost-effectiveness of various schemes for providing alternate foods to survivors of the catastrophe. [...]Olle Häggström takes as starting point for his contribution the observation that once a super intelligent AI is in place the future of humanity is likely to hinge on what goals and values are held by the machine, and digs into the challenges involved in trying to predict (and hopefully control) what these values will be. [...]Karim Jebari and Joakim Lundborg offer a distinction between intelligence and the more general notion of techne, to argue against the plausibility and likelihood of the kind of very rapid machine takeover associated with terms like intelligence explosion and Singularity, so that the kinds of apocalyptic AI scenarios discussed in the contributions by Torres, Miller and Häggström may turn out to be less likely than previously suggested.