Knowing when to pull the plug on AI

The mischievous owl of Minerva will take flight too late to save us

In 1820, George William Friedrich Hegel was completing a book of political philosophy. At the end of the preface, he added a caution, “One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy … always comes on the scene too late to give it.”

“The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and the owl was what we would today call her mascot. The owl’s late-day flight suggests that we can only truly understand the meaning of events as they are receding into history; people are powerless to make sense of a future that hasn’t yet happened.

That is the plight facing everyone who tries to figure out where the AI boom is headed. Does artificial intelligence promise to free humankind from drudgery and insoluble problems, heralding a golden age of leisure and amity?

Or are we headed to doom at the hands of what Yuval Noah Harari calls an “alien” form of intelligence heedless of our goals and values, but …