From Robert Lucien Howe
Like most articles on strong artificial intelligence, yours focused on the negatives and ignored the positives (23 April, p 32). Strong AI offers enormous, almost unlimited benefits for the future of humanity.
At the same time, your article still misses the real danger posed by AI – system infiltration. Intelligent machines are uniquely vulnerable to hacking. A few commands at its top level of control could turn almost any AI into a psychotic killing machine, create an ultimate terrorist weapon, or in the most extreme example even create an army of robot soldiers.
The first task of any designer is to make sure their machines are as invulnerable to infiltration as possible: if a machine is invaded it should destroy itself. The good side of this is that as long as it is not infiltrated by a hacker, no AI will ever be a threat to humanity. The catch is that only an expert in machine minds can make this judgement, and there are no experts in this field.
From David Pavett
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Before debate in the area of artificial intelligence gets bogged down in the technological gee-whizzery of genetic algorithms and neural networks, we would do well to reflect on one of the deepest theorems of computer science: what one computer can do can be done by any other (even if it might take a bit longer). This means that if any computer can be “intelligent” then so can the one on your desktop (even if it might need to tap into a larger memory).
There are likely to be fewer takers for the idea that computers might one day think when people realise that it implies that even the lowliest computer is a potential thinker, given the right program and enough memory.
Isleworth, Middlesex, UK
From Nicholas Argyris
I wonder how a computer would understand “bares fruit” in the first sentence of the final paragraph of your article: peeling apples, perhaps?
Trivial in itself no doubt, but the underlying point is that human intelligence allows us not to notice, or to take no notice of, many errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax and to get to the meaning. What are the chances of a computer learning to do this any time soon?
Forres, Morayshire, UK
Haltwhistle, Northumberland, UK
