From the Rational Optimist Society:
Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.
His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.
That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers.
More here.
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