From a WIRED blog, Table of Malcontents:

Let the robot holocaust commence: robots think we taste like bacon.

Researchers at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed the cute little guy to the right: a metal man gastronomist, “an electromechanical sommelier”, capable of identifying wines, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres. Upon being given a sample, he will speak up in a childlike voice and identify what he has just been fed. The idea is that wineries can tell if a wine is authentic without even opening the bottle, amongst other more obscure uses…like “tell me what this strange grayish lump at the back of my freezer is/was.”

But when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated.

Of course this is a joke, but it begs the question – by the time we create software capable of human-level intelligence, will we also be capable of giving it human-level common sense, human-level empathy, human-level wisdom, and human-level morality as well? Intelligence without these latter components could be extremely dangerous, dangerous as in fatal to the human race.

It’s exciting that Democrats came out on top in America’s recent election. But will it really influence, in the 10-30 year timeframe, the likelihood that we will make AI friendly before it gets smarter than us? The answer is probably not. These issues are primarily technical, not political. That’s the world we live in today – it’s gotten to the point where the technical is so important, the political becomes a vanishing variable in the equation.

It’s easy to get caught up in what’s emotionally and historically valent, like political elections. Unfortunately, it’s what lacks visceral emotional valence that will ultimately dictate our fates.