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When we are faced with a fundamental challenge to our core beliefs, we tend to stick to our guns. People don’t tolerate this cognitive dissonance for very long. While in our intuitive psychology thinking minds, animacy and agency all go hand in hand, Siri and Roomba demonstrate that these properties can be severed - they think, but they are mindless they are inanimate but semiautonomous. Their acts, like ours, are impelled by information (thinking), but their thinking arises from silicon, metal, plastic and glass. Siri and Roomba are man-made artifacts, but they exhibit some of the same intelligent behavior that we typically ascribe to living agents. The psychologist Paul Bloom suggests that intuitively, all people are dualists, believing that mind and matter are entirely distinct.ĪI violates this bedrock belief. Extensive psychological testing shows that this is true for people in all kinds of societies.

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Our unconscious intuitive psychology causes us to believe that thinking is free from the physical constraints on matter. Of course, most modern adults know that thought occurs in the physical brain. We thus ascribe human actions, not to external material forces, but to internal mental states. People, in contrast, are agents who have minds of their own, which endow them with knowledge, beliefs, and goals that motivate them to move on their own accord. In our intuitive psychology, objects like balls always obey the laws of physics -they move only by contact with other objects. That is because we instinctively interpret the actions of physical objects, like balls, and living agents, like people, according to different sets of principles. But you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see me spontaneously rise from my seat on the couch and head toward the refrigerator.

If you saw a ball start rolling all by itself, you’d be astonished. This fear emanates from the psychological distinction we draw between mind and matter. Tales like these suggest that our fear of AI arises not from AI itself, but from the human mind. And then there is our fascination with tales of zombies, corpses that are reanimated through witchcraft. Predictably, the golem rebelled, not unlike Adam in Genesis, who was likewise created out of dust and brought to life when God breathed his spirit into Adam’s nostrils. Hundreds of years earlier, there was the story of the golem - an automaton created out of river clay and brought to life by kabbalistic magic. Frankenstein created a humanoid monster who promptly rebelled. In fact, humanity’s worries about being conquered by omnipotent, inanimate, man-made artifacts is much older than computer technology. With AI, people worry that it will acquire autonomous agency and outsmart and overthrow its human masters. People don’t merely worry that the new technology could cause accidents or fall into the wrong hands.

Yet in popular opinion, the AI risk is greater than those and different in kind. Previous technological revolutions - whether driven by steam, electricity, atomic energy or CRISPR - have raised similar challenges. These are all very good reasons to watch it closely and regulate it aggressively. Make no mistake - AI does pose many real dangers to us: to our personal privacy and security, to our democracy and to the future of the economy. If your Tesla cannot reliably avoid an unfamiliar obstacle on the road, it is hard to see how it would take the initiative to hijack the vehicle. In short, AI still lacks “common sense.” This doesn’t bode well for the AI conspiracy. When asked to provide a list of restaurants that are not McDonald’s, Siri still spits out a list of local McDonald’s restaurants she just doesn’t get the “no” part of “no.” AI can also fail to recognize familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts (a baby on the highway) or to separate associations from causes. In a critical evaluation of AI, the cognitive and computer scientists Gary Marcus and Ernest Davies demonstrate that the state of the art of AI is still quite far from true intelligence. The Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom worries that artificial intelligence poses a greater threat to humanity than climate change, and the bestselling historian Yuval Noah Harari warns that the history of tomorrow may belong to the cult of Dataism, in which humanity willingly merges itself into the flow of information controlled by artificial systems.īut in truth, these doomsday scenarios are nowhere in sight. As AI encroaches on every aspect of our lives, people watch with a mixture of fascination, bewilderment and fear.ĪI’s overthrow of humanity is a familiar trope in popular culture, from Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” to the “Terminator” movies and “The Matrix.” Some scholars express similar concerns. It helps drive your car, recognizes your face at the airport’s immigration checkpoint, interprets your CT scans, reads your resume, traces your interactions on social media, and even vacuums your carpet.

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