I was looking at Crisis News Network (motto: We print all the trivial news about celebrities and none about stuff that matters) and there was an article posing the idea that "Terminators" could be real. I read it and found it was by a researcher at Oxford regarding artificial intelligence and the possibility that machines would soon outstrip human intelligence, possibly with a bad outcome for us. What caught my eye, and the reason I'm writing about this, is the author's reference to evolutionary intelligence.
The article was in some ways simply a promo piece for a book the author wrote (the author is Nick Bostrom - you can look it up on Amazon), but the notion of evolutionary intelligence is worth considering. The book I'm using in my "Evolution for Everyone" class notes that computer scientists are using evolutionary algorithms to develop programs much faster than they could do so by "hand" - and the programs so developed are often better than those written by a human programmer. The fear expressed by Bostrom is that such programs could reach a tipping point where the machines writing the programs would begin to alter the environment in a way that suits them and not us. The idea that we need to impart wisdom to computers rather than simply "intelligence" struck me as worthy.
His book received positive reviews, so I may check it out. The theme that we often develop technologies that seem "good" and then turn out to have some major downsides is not new, but it becomes increasingly dangerous as those technologies become more powerful. Evolution is the most powerful organic force we know of, and we tinker with it without having the wisdom to handle it wisely.
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