Is AI a Danger to Humanity?

I grew up as a science fiction nerd.  I consumed a great deal of SF starting with comic books, DC comics of course, with all the superheroes who were my idols if not models of what a hero should be.  As I grew older – perhaps not growing up in this area, I graduated to science fiction novels.  Of course, being a child of the manse (minister’s kid), I also had a good dose of bible stories, and I always favoured the old testament with its heroes such as the shepherd boy David who slew the giant Goliath with a stone from his sling, and Samson who slew the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass.  There was also Noah who built the arc to house two animals or every kind (or seven depending on the verse).  Somehow, I missed the part of the story where Noah becomes drunk and naked, to the shame of his sons, after the flood.  But that came later in my education.

One of the science fiction authors that I consumed was the great Isaac Asimov who wrote novels such as the Foundation Trilogy.  His work came to mind with the recent discussion and controversy around the expectations claiming that there is a possibility that Artificial Intelligence could break out and severely harm, if not wipe out humanity.  Being a person of great imagination, Asimov foresaw the danger in AI early on and devised a solution to the problem of robots running amok and doing harm to people on even a universal scale. 

His solution was the Three Laws of Robotics.  Using AI, I was quickly able to refresh my memory of the Three Laws and what they involved.  Here’s the information provided by Google AI.  I think that in this case the information can be trusted as being accurate and not invented by AI.

 The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Asimov's Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Laws

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:^[1]

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The Laws are incorporated into almost all of the positronic robots appearing in his fiction, and cannot be bypassed, being intended as a safety feature.  Asimov added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others:

1.    A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

 

It seems to me that this would address the challenge which has been identified by those AI geeks.  However, the obvious problem is that there we are not dealing with the positronic brain that was envisioned by Asimov – whatever that actually would entail.  I do know that Data, Star Trek, the Next Generation had one – but even an inveterate watcher of TNG didn’t understand what a positronic brain would consist of. 

The other problem seems to be that there seems to be little desire on the part of the world governments of countries where AI is being developed at such dramatic speed, to put controls on the developers.  It requires something like a nuclear proliferation treaty requiring all countries to put those laws or restrictions in place. 

We can only hope and pray that governments will wake up and smell the bacon sizzling on the AI hot plate before it is too late.  After all, even a 5% possibility of annihilation (one of the lower estimates) is 5% too much.