80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines

This week’s guest is George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com.http://twitter.com/dvorskyhttp://kinja.com/georgedvorskyhttp://www.sentientdevelopments.com/https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202We Discuss:• Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading…• Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthome devices that speak to them by name, grow up with a different idea of what entities deserve our moral concern?• The pressing cybersecurity and surveillance problems we encounter in the process of filling our lives with internet-connected devices.• Autonomous vehicles and weapons and the ethics of machine intelligence.• The history of our attempts to suppress or prevent the industrialization of warfare.• AI as proxy selves that we can deputize to act as us, on our behalf…• What kind of literacies will we need to have in a world of mature AI?• The future of human-AI collaboration in the arts and creative media.• This story he covered for Gizmodo:https://gizmodo.com/a-four-year-old-boy-used-siri-to-save-his-unconscious-m-1793584170• Is paper a “broken” non-interactive touchscreen?• Mapmaking and prosthesis, and how differently we orient ourselves in landscapes now that we use Google Maps (or Waze, or Apple Maps, or Mapquest, or or or).• And is it ethical to increase the intelligence of other animals? Is it wrong to create an Interspecies Internet that weaves nonhuman persons into our already-messy processes of electronic governance and culture? Or is it morally required of us to go “all together now” and bring the rest of the biosphere with us into the heavens we create?• The transformation of the biosphere into superintelligence – as an ethical necessity.“I always like to look at things around us today that we will laugh at years from now and then marvel at how stupid it was…”“My own gut instinct is that very, very few people would willingly plow their car through a bus stop filled with passengers. So why do we feel that we wouldn’t want to own a car that’s programmed with that same ethical sensibility?”“I’m on team AI. I’m all for it. I cannot wait to see what artificial intelligence may do…four to five generations from now.”Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Join our Facebook Discussion Group for daily news and conversations:http://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSupport the show (and an avalanche of other mind-expanding media):http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe