There’s nothing theoretically impossible, I think, about superintelligent machines, and if humans go on long enough, they and even far stranger things will come to pass. But the Singularity is not near, nowhere near near. There are plenty of machine-related issues to worry about in the meantime: Weak AI may decimate employment, the Internet of Things will place us inside of a machine with no OFF switch and automation could lead to a cascading disaster. Machines needn’t be conscious to help or hurt. 

In a smart Aeon essay, Luciano Floridi analyzes the increasingly popular idea that AI is our biggest existential threat, even more so than climate change. An excerpt:

True AI is not logically impossible, but it is utterly implausible. We have no idea how we might begin to engineer it, not least because we have very little understanding of how our own brains and intelligence work. This means that we should not lose sleep over the possible appearance of some ultraintelligence. What really matters is that the increasing presence of ever-smarter technologies is having huge effects on how we conceive of ourselves, the world, and our interactions. The point is not that our machines are conscious, or intelligent, or able to know something as we do. They are not. There are plenty of well-known results that indicate the limits of computation, so-called undecidable problems for which it can be proved that it is impossible to construct an algorithm that always leads to a correct yes-or-no answer.

We know, for example, that our computational machines satisfy the Curry-Howard correspondence, which indicates that proof systems in logic on the one hand and the models of computation on the other, are in fact structurally the same kind of objects, and so any logical limit applies to computers as well. Plenty of machines can do amazing things, including playing checkers, chess and Go and the quiz show Jeopardy better than us. And yet they are all versions of a Turing Machine, an abstract model that sets the limits of what can be done by a computer through its mathematical logic.

Quantum computers are constrained by the same limits, the limits of what can be computed (so-called computable functions). No conscious, intelligent entity is going to emerge from a Turing Machine.•