‘Godfather’ of artificial intelligence has a surprising blindspot | Artificial intelligence (AI)

Prof Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather  of synthetic intelligence”, states that he struggles to search out examples of “extra clever factor[s] being managed by … much less clever factor[s]”; the mother-baby relationship is the one instance he can cite (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December). This appears a wierd outbreak of side blindness, particularly given Hinton’s specialism.

Many theorists (Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and others) provide persuasive arguments displaying how (to borrow from Freud) “man just isn’t grasp in his personal home”: human behaviour is frequently, at instances conspicuously, regulated by non-human drivers, lots of them seemingly fairly dumb. Coronaviruses provide a topical instance. The current barely regulated rise of AI is unarguably scary, however coping with it successfully will contain people getting actual about their non-mastery of all they survey and interrogating the ways in which stuff (each good and dumb) controls us, in addition to vice-versa. The identical goes for local weather breakdown and ecological disaster.
Rachel Withers
London

Prof Hinton says there are few examples of a “much less” clever being controlling a extra clever one. Leaving apart the problem of really defining what intelligence is, can I counsel that the age-old and still-thriving establishments of slavery and political oppression match the invoice? Any variations in intelligence between the oppressors and people they oppress is irrelevant as to how profitable these enterprises are. After all, if we intentionally hand over the administration of our affairs to those benighted AI machines, we deserve every thing we get.
George Burt
Glasgow