Dr. Steve Petersen Offers Outlook on Coexistence of Humans & Robots
A recent Oxford University Press collection that examines the ethics of artificial intelligence includes a chapter by Dr. Steve Petersen, associate professor of philosophyat Niagara University, on how a “superintelligence” – an AI much smarter than humans – would (or could) learn to be ethical.
Dr. Petersen’s chapter, “Superintelligence as Superethical,” which appears in Robot Ethics 2.0, rebukes an idea from a Nick Bostrom book that outlines a frightening but realistic scenario for human extinction: true artificial intelligence is likely to bootstrap itself into superintelligence, and thereby become ideally effective at achieving its goals. Human-friendly goals seem too abstract to be pre-programmed with any confidence, wrote Bostrom, and if those goals are not explicitly favorable toward humans, the superintelligence will extinguish the human race—not through any malice, but simply because it will want human resources for its own purposes.