While Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking say that unregulated artificial intelligence (AI) could open the door to a technological dystopia, the man who would be the Warren Buffet of technology investment has spoken up for the machines. Delivering the keynote address at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Softbank founder Masayoshi Son anticipated a brave new world where computer chips could have an IQ of 10,000. At that point, 30 years away, your shoes could be more intelligent than yourself. That’s fairly dystopian, actually.
Science fiction loves and fears the hardware littering its worlds. Our fascination with labour-saving devices is reflected in machines which slavishly tend to humans. But the possibility of machines replicating and taking control inspires anxiety. And there is dark talk of the singularity — the point at which machine intelligence passeth human understanding, and reality baffles us.
