The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.
Nick Bilton
Upheavals
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So, who changed the program?
People who dream up silly scenarios like this one generally have very little understanding of what a program is and what it can and cannot do. ‘To rid cancer’ is not a possible function of a computer program; for that matter, it isn’t even a grammatical English phrase.
Mr. Bilton spends a great deal of his time covering tech news, usually from a provocative or incendiary angle. However, I don’t see anything in his C.V. to suggest that he could write a program more sophisticated than ‘Hello, World!’
That CV suggest that poseur couldn’t do that much in 6809 machine code or assembler. (It’s really not that hard; it just requires actually RTFM.)
This idea goes all the way back to H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang and Asimov’s stories from the 1940s, not to mention being implicit in turn-of-the-20th-century linguistic ponderings. So I’m even less impressed.
…because, you know, robots don’t have off switches and nobody is watching what they are doing.
Nick, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.