As Machines Get Smarter, How Will We Relate to Them?
WiredBicycling in a hilly, busy city like San Francisco provides a cognitive as well as a physical workout. With thinking machines, says Iyad Rahwan, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, “we're sort of stumbling in the dark.” Our tendency is to assume, perhaps without realizing it, that AI systems have minds somewhat like ours. In the 1960s, MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum created the world's first chatbot, ELIZA, and programmed it to parody a therapist by responding to typed statements by rephrasing them into questions. “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he wrote. The perky feminine-coded personas of virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa divert us from considering the risks of allowing large corporations to record in our intimate spaces.
Discover Related
