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“… For many years, the conventional wisdom, certainly within the auto industry, was that carmakers would never introduce intelligent safety features so long as there were plaintiff lawyers. Autonomous technology shifted the liability for accidents from the car’s owner to the car’s maker, said industry spokespeople, and was tantamount to corporate suicide. Three developments changed their minds. First, active safety technologies have become substantially more robust, thanks to improvements in sensor design, and, most importantly, in sensor fusion and planning algorithms. Second, drive-by-wire has rendered the legal debate largely academic - car functions are already mediated by computers, one way or another. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the auto industry experienced an unprecedented, violently destabilizing, massive contraction. Technology that previously seemed like a grave, existential threat now seems like the least of their problems. It turns out that, innovation, like freedom, “is just another word for having nothing left to lose.” … Essays about artificial intelligence normally end with some ponderous treacle proclaiming how the more we study AI, the more we appreciate the human mind in all its splendiferous mystery. This is, to be charitable, wishful thinking. AI does teach us about intelligence. It teaches us that “intelligence” is a motley assortment of heuristics, kludges, and cheap tricks. The danger with AI is not that machines will become smarter than us, but that we will become as dumb as machines. The absurdly prescient William S. Burroughs was wise to this fifty years ago. “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods,” pronounces Dr. Benway, in 1959’s Naked Lunch. “Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.” |
