Robots and Me

Nobody is likely to confuse me with Elon Musk, but we share something apart from the burden of an unusual first name and a penchant for pink-trimmed trackie tops: we might be the only two techies on the planet who aren’t thrilled by the thought of Artificial General – i.e. human-level or better – Intelligence. But I think Mr Musk is missing a trick: the real threat to humanity isn’t clever tech’s potential to become a tool of evil dictators. It’s something far more likely, far more insidious. Want to know more? Watch Mr Musk making his case for existential terror while rocking the aforementioned athleisurewear. Check out my budget fashion alternative , and read on to find out why I’m even more panicked than someone who runs three high-risk companies , can’t get a good night’s sleep , and has incurred the social media-fuelled wrath of Azealea Banks . What Mr Musk is scared of Mr Musk – for those of you too impatient to sit through the video or too distracted by hi...

Let me tell you a story: A boy and his father are in a car crash.   The father is killed outright, the son needs emergency brain surgery.   At the hospital, the senior brain surgeon takes one look and yells at the nearest nurse: “Fetch my second-in-command – I can’t operate on my own son!” How is this possible? In several decades of telling this riddle, I’ve been amazed by the creativity of the solutions proposed: adoption, mistaken identity, baby-boys-swapped-at-the-hospital, Witness Protection Program, resurrection, gay dads, prosopagnosia, you name it. Only about one in ten people have come up with what should be the glaringly obvious answer: the brain surgeon is the boy’s mother. Why don’t most people get it? Despite the fact that most English words are on the surface gender-neutral (we don’t say “brain-surgery-man”), English speakers tend to make strong gender assumptions about nouns. We unconsciously expect important jobs, like brain surgeons, C...