Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, believes that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes”. The “biggest existential threat” to humanity, he thinks, is a Terminator-like super machine intelligence that will one day dominate humanity. Luckily, Mr Musk is mistaken.
Plenty of machines can do amazing things, often better than humans. For instance, IBM’s Deep Blue computer played and beat the Grand Master Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. In 2011, another IBM machine, Watson, won an episode of the TV quiz show Jeopardy, beating two human players, one of whom had enjoyed a 74-show winning streak. The sky, it seems, is the limit.
Yet Deep Blue and Watson are versions of the “Turing machine”, a mathematical model devised by Alan Turing which sets the limits of what a computer can do. A Turing machine has no understanding, no consciousness, no intuitions — in short, nothing we would recognise as a mental life. It lacks the intelligence even of a mouse.