The Real Risks of AI

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Augmenting our own abilities is the best possible defense


“There is a movie called ‘Arrival’ that I happened to work on as a science adviser. And it’s about communicating. I realized that the problem of communicating with extraterrestrials is bizarrely similar to the problem of communicating intentions to AIs. An AI is an example of an alien intelligence, so to speak.”

— Stephen Wolfram, CEO, Wolfram Research

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You’re Fired — Democracy, Dystopia and the Cult of the CEO

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All rise for the corporate anthem—screenshot from Rollerball (1975)

In the year 2018, nations have bankrupted and disappeared, replaced by corporations.”

That’s the premise of the 1975 sci-fi film Rollerball, which follows one star employee’s awakening and rebellion against the regime embodied by a cynical leader of the global Energy Corp. Rollerball is about as 70s a dystopia as you will find, with James Caan roller-skating through a Howard Cosell remix of The Parallax View. But as the real 2018 comes into view, the movie proves weirdly prescient, as the United States morphs into a corporate state literally governed by CEOs.

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