The Real Threat Of “runaway” A.i.

Geoffrey Hinton, a legendary computer scientist, recently quit Google to speak freely about his fears that A.I. systems will soon become smarter than us and gain the power to enslave or kill us. This concern is not new, as philosopher Nick Bostrom made similar warnings in his 2014 book Superintelligence. A tight-knit community has since formed, believing that A.I. poses an existential risk to the human race and setting the terms of the A.I. safety debate. However, this focus on the potential dangers of A.I. may be distracting from the real threats posed by the technology.