We’re going to need people like Taylor Olson to man the wall.
The giants sat in the window of our corner coffee shop whispering into Taylor’s ears.
On one side was the Swedish pacifist who invented dynamite, on the other was the Father of the A-Bomb.
Taylor is working on a PhD dissertation about “ethical intuition” applied to the technology that promises to affect us in ways its creators don’t yet understand. We are going to need a firewall to protect us.
If Artificial Intelligence turns ugly, Taylor will tell you, we’ll have ourselves to blame. If we feed it junk information, indulge its tantrums and don’t set boundaries while it’s still in its infancy, well then, that’s on us.
Contrary to early reports, AI will not be all powerful. It doesn’t process information easily from one field to another. It’s not good with inconsistency. Irony and hypocrisy may trip it up.
Taylor would prefer a university career rather than enter the private sector. But as the experience of Nobel and later Oppenheimer can attest, much of the funding for this revolutionary technology will come from the military industrial complex.
His reading of philosophy, Kant on morality in particular, dovetails with his pursuit of mathematics and computer logic. But the more Taylor comes to understand, the more questions he finds to ask.
It was good be inside on that raw Wednesday afternoon, out of the rain.
