Taming the Monsters of Tomorrow

DRAFT

Kupferschmidt, Kai. "Taming the Monsters of Tomorrow." In 2018 Frankenstein Centenary coverage in Science vol. 359 issue 6372 (12 January 2018): specifically 152-55. <www.sciencemag.org>. Available on line to subscribers here.[1]

Looks at real-world books and projects trying to anticipate existential threats to humanity and human civilization, either in terms of extinction or reduction of our material culture to, say, Medieval levels. Briefly discusses works dealing with various threats, including biological, but stresses potential dangers from AI, as handled in such works as Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2014).[2][3] For Bostrom and others, if a supercomputer acquired superintelligence and "a will of its own, it might turn malevolent and actively seek to destroy humans, like HAL, the computer that goes rogue aboard a spaceship in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey — although a more likely danger is AI error (155). The threat of machine take-over by AI is developed in the Colossus novels and the film COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT, and the destruction (or attempted destruction) of the human species in such works as the TERMINATOR movies and Harlan Ellison's horrific short story, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Max Tegmark holds "The real problem with AI is not malice, it's incompetence" — but this theme is developed much less (if at all?) in apocalyptic SF.

For a real-world brush with massive destruction caused by system error — almost undoubtedly a computer error — note the "1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident," where only the heroic common sense of Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov prevented a highly lethal response by the USSR to what appeared to be a US missile attack. Note on the other side that a good deal of Cold War stupidity by men in positions of power was also involved in the incident.[4]

RDE, Initial Compiler, 08/09Feb18, 18July19