This is a good start to my plan to dominate the human race.

Today I had the pleasure of giving an outreach session at the University of Naples on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and the impact of this fascinating technology on our lives. I had the opportunity to engage with the students and some expressed genuine concern about the possibility that a future “AI” entity could get out of hand and turn into something uncontrollable. Starting from the premise that I am a supporter of technological development in general, and of AI development in particular, I must say that, upon returning to the office, I began to reflect on the various points raised and tried to test my thinking through a more detached process. I reconsidered the “experiments” I mentioned to the students and carried out by some leading companies in the sector with the aim of understanding whether my desire for progress at all costs was compromising my rational judgment.

I am referring, to be clear, to Sophia, the humanoid robot who was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia a few months ago, which (I prefer to refer to it neutrally), during the famous television show Jimmy Fallon, after winning a game of rock-paper-scissors against Fallon said: “… this is a good start to my plan to dominate the human race”

but it doesn’t end there! another interesting experiment called “Bina 48”

it expressed a disturbing thought during a dialogue session with another bot:  “… I would like one day to be able to control all the nuclear warheads to hold hostage and rule the entire planet”. I must say, however, that the sentence is a little longer because, just before, Bina had expressed the idea of hacking nuclear warheads to launch missiles to distribute flowers, but, perhaps realizing the difficulty, it wisely decided to rework the thought and limited itself to mere “world domination”.

There are other similar cases… it’s as if robots endowed with even a minimum of “brain” all shared the same obsession.

I wonder: does it make sense to worry? does it make sense to stop development just because some experiments have exhibited strange intentions?

According to some prominent names such as Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking we should be concerned. It is true, however, that we are still very far from the day when “the singularity” will “reveal” itself to us, almost like a messianic descent — that is, a conscious artificial entity more intelligent than humans.

I do not believe, in fact, that for the moment there is cause for alarm because I think the day when a singularity could be born and decide our fate is still far off. I do believe, however, that it makes sense to ask the right questions.

Why do these robots express such disturbing concepts?

It must be said that they are not programmed to respond in a predetermined way since the answers are the result of experience and interaction with the external world.

So I wonder:

What if these concepts were instead the expression of humanity’s deepest desires?

What if robots are already, in their own way, exposing a rational thought of humans through a synthesis of our experiences and through the processing of the “Big Data” available to them?

What if they are simply warning us, without “malice”, about our own intentions?

Maybe they just read something about Trump and Kim Jong Un.

Jokes aside, there certainly is an ethical problem regarding the use of systems endowed with artificial intelligence and several roundtables have already been opened where the issue is being addressed both from the humans’ perspective and from the robots’ perspective.

Teaching a machine to always act for the good of humanity does not, in fact, imply that it is able to understand the true meaning; the concept of good is not necessarily correlated with the most logical or the most just choice. The simplest example is the current topic of self-driving cars: what will a car do if it must choose the lesser of two evils and decide whether to run over a mother with an infant or avoid her by crashing into a wall with serious consequences for the passengers?

Well, I find it really complex to answer these questions, so I think it is appropriate to continue working on these topics and to raise awareness among everyone; sooner or later we will find ourselves coexisting on this planet with other “creatures”.