This Is What It Will Look Like When Robots Take All Our Jobs

September 15, 2014

(New Republic) – Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom thinks we’re neglecting the biggest challenge that we as a species are likely to face this century: what to do when the machines take over. We already have artificially-intelligent machines that are “super-human” in specific domains like playing chess and processing certain kinds of data, but Bostom believes we’re not far off from creating machines whose general intelligence and learning ability exceed our own. We chatted about why humanity is in its teenage phase, whether there’s anything we can do to preempt the machines, and just how realistic is Spike Jonze’s Her. His new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, is out this month.