Will Artificial Intelligence Be the End of Civilization, or the Beginning?

Artificial Intelligence: magic genie or threat to humanity? On one hand, AI is presented as a magic genie that can solve all of our problems with superhuman intelligence. On the other hand, it's presented as an unprecedented threat to humanity, with the danger of loss of jobs, loss of privacy, automated discrimination, even some kind of "robot rebellion". No wonder the public is confused. Which is it?

We present a view that is different from both the self-interested promotion of the tech companies, and from the pessimism of the social critics. Believe it or not, the biggest value of AI will lie, not in simply improving the operations of today's industry and government, but in making it possible to have a more cooperative, less competitive world.

Our view is:

• Optimistic. Mitigating possible dangers of AI in today's society is important. But we don't want to let fear cause us to miss the potential for AI to tackle big problems people now think are intractable: war, poverty, climate, etc.

• Radical. Many tech boosters imagine simply pouring AI into today's economy and electoral politics. We think these systems need to be redesigned from scratch for the AI era. We have two concrete proposals: Makerism (economics) and Reasonocracy (governance).

• Original. Not conventionally Left or Right, though our ideas share some design goals with both sides. Not (yet) heard on mainstream or activist media.

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This is a joint meeting of the GBC/ACM (http://www.gbcacm.org) and the Boston Chapter of the IEEE-CS.