The Three Laws of AI

Preventing the Golem

A golem is a creature formed out of a lifeless substance such as dust or earth that is brought to life by ritual incantations and sequences of Hebrew letters.

From my observations, the most common human emotions displayed in response to press reports on Artificial Intelligence are fear, uncertainty and doubt. Moreover, these reports often comprise one-sided polemics, arguing that Artificial Intelligence is set to supplant humans at any moment, leading people to forget that entirely replacing humans proves most challenging. With the right laws, technology and humanity likely converge to benefit both.

Consider first the most human and unfortunate activity: the waging of war. Here, the soldier's part in the decision-making has become increasingly remote from the danger, which is good.

Ask yourself, "How in control of a military drone is the pilot operator?" Note that the weapons can only be fired when directly cleared by a room full of lawyers watching via video, the flight plan is ordained by a computer as dictated by the command staff, an intelligence operation picks the targets, and the very aerodynamics of the drone itself is controlled by computer systems guided by satellites. Moreover, the operator is usually in a totally different country from the drone; if he tries to do something not ordained, others can take control of his drone in seconds. And yet we still think of the operator as being in "control"? Should we not realise that in this scenario, the human is almost totally integrating with machine intelligence?

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