Humanising Machines or Mechanising Humans Artificial Intelligence: Issues & Perspectives

It is common to speak of the AI revolution as though it is an even that is expected to take place in the future, but in fact this event has already begun, and we are, unbeknownst to most of us, riding the crest of the wave.  The enormous potential that AI hints at, which is currently in our hands, forces us to confront the hard questions of what it means to be a human and what it means to be a machine. Many of these questions have had no clear answer from the beginning of civilisation and rational discourse, and will probably never have an answer that satisfies everyone. In the midst of this uncertainty, AI intrudes as a hugely disruptive technology. Those who exhort caution are frequently caricatured as conspiracy theorists, but as James Barrat says, AI may very well be our last invention, not because AI would necessarily turn out to be evil as in some Sci-Fi movie, but because human agents may be identified as inefficient bottlenecks in the calculations of a superintelligent AI optimised for efficiency, and with no malevolence whatever, it may override our plans just nonchalantly as we think nothing of stepping on insects as we go about our daily lives. Provided this does not happen, and the AI we create retains the goals given to it initially by human programmers, such a subservient or co-operative AI could indeed prove to be a highly useful tool that boosts our rational investigation and technological prowess to an almost infinite degree.