How fatalistic should we be on AI?

A long line of prestigious speakers, ranging from Sir Winston Churchill to Dame Iris Murdoch, has delivered the annual Romanes lecture at the University of Oxford, starting with William Gladstone in 1892.

But rarely, if ever, can a lecturer have made such an arresting comment as Geoffrey Hinton did last month. The leading artificial intelligence researcher’s speech, provocatively entitled Will Digital Intelligence Replace Biological Intelligence?, concluded: almost certainly, yes. But Hinton rejected the idea, common in some West Coast tech circles, that humanism is somehow “racist” in continuing to assert the primacy of our own species over electronic forms of intelligence. “We humans should make our best efforts to stay around,” he joked.