🔮🐇 National AI; machine behaviour and moral machines; the limits of robots; sci-fi, Viagra and making friends++ #159

Dept of the near future

💯 “We are here to create”. Wonderful interview with Kai-Fu Lee, pioneering AI researcher and head of one of China’s Top VC firms. He’s been frank about the risks: “We’re all going to face a very challenging next fifteen or twenty years, when half of the jobs are going to be replaced by machines. Humans have never seen this scale of massive job decimation” and dismissive of the notion of the singularity which isn’t based on any “engineering reality”.

🔥 Facebook's senior exec, Andrew Bosworth’s leaked 2016 memo is a fascinating read. “We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified…[m]aybe someone dies.” He doesn’t use the word “utilitarian” or “consequentialist” but he describes essentially that. A single objective (growth) to be optimised for, and to hell with the consequences. (See also this eye-opening tale of how scammers use the Facebook ad platform.)

🌪️ A case for broadening the study of machine behaviour. These AI systems “…