This magazine circulates to 60,000 Canadian Christians. It’s not a stupid publication just because it’s Christian… atheist Digg/Reddit geeks (80% of the audience of this blog, I’d wager) need to broaden their horizons just a bit. Remember that Christians and other Theologians can think and say many intelligent things because they compartmentalize their thinking effectively. The topic of the article is friendly AI, and many people already said that they thought this was one of the best mainstream media articles on the topic because it doesn’t take a simplistic angle and actually probes the technical issues.
Here’s the bit with me in it:
Nevertheless, technologists are busy fleshing out the idea of “friendly AI” in order to safeguard humanity. The theory goes like this: if AI computer code is steeped in pacifist values from the very beginning, super-intelligence won’t rewrite itself into a destroyer of humans. “We need to specify every bit of code, at least until the AI starts writing its own code,” says Michael Anissimov, media director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a San …