Intro to Fear of an AI Planet

AI is in many ways a fearful proposition; however accustomed we are to the positivist idea that the world is made up only of our experiences and the cybernetics idea that we are fundamentally very complicated machines, many people are scared of the idea of intelligent machines that are not under human control. Granted, humans are intelligent and are free to act as they will (though they may be punished for breaking the rules), but the general assumption about AI is that because its creations will be computers, and computers inevitably break, they might have the power to hurt humans due to a misunderstanding of morality. There are several ways in which intelligent technologies have become part of our cultural consciousness that cause uneasiness in many people. One is

Hidden technology,

that is, the proliferation of computers, frequently unseen, within and around our lives. Another is the

Killer Robot problem,

the fear that morality and/or ethics themselves are not fully calculable phenomena, and therefore that AI researchers will create AI systems that have a lot of power but no morality or ethics and will cause damage.

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