Yesterday, I attended the appellate hearing in the case of Nonhuman Rights Project v. Tommy, a suit filed by the NRP to free a chimp from captivity by means of a writ of habeus corpus. The NRP is taking the position that chimps are legal "persons" entitled to "bodily liberty." I filed an amicus brief in opposing the writ on legal, practical and ethical grounds. Attended by the press and a few animal rights enthusiasts, yesterday's court hearing was best summarized in Wired, S

Earlier today, I filed an amicus brief in opposition to a lawsuit by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NRP) to release a chimp from captivity in upstate New York--not pursuant to existing laws governing the mistreatment of animals, but on the novel basis that the chimps are “persons” under the law entitling them to deliverance via habeas corpus. . The trial court denied the writ and NRP appealed, but the owner of the chimp informed the court that he would not be filing a response,

Daniel Dewey, a research fellow on Machine Superintelligence and the Future of AI at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, has made available the slides for his recent talk entitled, What to do about intelligence explosion? (For background, you might wish to view Mr. Dewey's 15-minute, 2013 Ted Talk in which he provides an overview of the intelligence explosion problem. Dewey stands with Nick Bostrom (Oxford), Eliezer Yudowsky (MIRI), and Stephen Omohundro (UC Ber

In today's Independent, famed-physicist Stephen Hawking joined several colleagues in sounding the alarm about the risks of artificial intelligence. Writing in the wake of the release of the Johnny Depp film Transcendence, it would be a "mistake," Hawking says, "to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction," perhaps "our worst mistake in history." Success in creating AI, he says, would be the biggest event in human history, affording us huge pot

After the singularity scientist Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is shot by an anti-robot extremist, Caster's wife, Evelyn, manages to upload her dying husband's mind to the core of an existing artificially intelligent machine. There, the combined intelligences grow exponentially to the point where it learns to manipulate the world's power supplies, means of telecommunications, the FBI and, of course, his wife. Evelyn -- persuaded by the machine, or out of love for her husband, or b

On the suggestion of an advertisement, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) downloads what the ad declares to be the first artificially intelligent operating system—“not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.” The software takes Apple’s Siri to a new level, interacting with the user in human-like ways. In a word, it’s a good bet the machine would pass the Turing Test. Theodore, a man in search of companionship, chooses a female voice, and with the voice of Scarlett Joh

Deep-seated fears of technology have long been a subject that has repeatedly surfaced in the imaginative realm of sci-fi writers--from Asimov's iRobot to Star Trek's Ulimate Computer, The Terminator's Skynet, The Matrix's simulated reality, Battlestar Gallactica's cylons, Robocop's cybogs, and Transcendant's uploaded consciousness, just to name a few. But as Stephen Hawking once remarked, "Today's science fiction is often tomorrow's scientific fact." Many believe it is inevit