Just what is the promise of AI?

Perhaps it is merely a tool of our worst impulses.

The promise of Artificial Intelligence, in particular as applied to robotics, may have little to do with actual intelligence. In fact, AI/robotics may become problematic if the intelligence component is taken too far. I’m not talking about how some future AI becomes smarter than humans, but rather how businesses don’t want something that thinks too much.

They want something that thinks just right. Like the clip above, from The Man Who Would Be King, the mechanistic drills and rigid discipline make use of a certain subset of intelligence, but requires other components of intelligence to be down-played.

The fact is that what started out as an academic exercise in trying to understand human intelligence has turned into a hope for a mechanized workforce that is tireless, consistent and tractable in the way humans are not. Because it is now being motivated by seemingly amoral capitalists like Jeff Bezos the real goal may be an acceptable type of exploitation, or slavery, not unlike agricultural use of horses and donkeys in days past.

The goal of Artificial Intelligence/robotics may be, in fact, an anti-humanism in its most pragmatic sense…