When Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates talked about the promise and the peril of Artificial Intelligence last year, the media only heard the peril part. And the Terminator got a new lease of life. Since then a more balanced approach has been settling in.
As a wise and sapient reader of this blog, you already know that those luminaries were prompted to comment on AI by the publication of Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence”. (If you haven’t read it yet, you should.)
Bostrom is often characterised as a doom-sayer, which he categorically is not. Although the New Year fireworks are but a memory, 2016 is still a young year, so I thought I would post this link to an extraordinarily uplifting snatch of optimism that Bostrom posted on his blog back in 2006.
It’s called a Letter from Utopia, and it needs no further introduction.
Click here to read the rest…
