Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

by Mo Gawdat

The next time you get the ‘Are you human?’ test on a website, you are not only proving that you are human, but by providing an answer you are also building a test for the student bots. Have you been seeing lots of questions about traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lines lately? Of course you have. These are being used to train self-driving cars by collecting billions of traffic-related photos that you and I are recruited, for free, to identify. The first students that survive are just lucky to have started with a random code that is slightly better than those who were not so fortunate. Soon, however, the value of luck fades as keeping only what works, and attempting to improve millions of copies of it, eventually yields a student bot that can actually tell 8s from 3s. As this talented bot is copied and changed, slowly the average test score rises, leaving only the smartest of all students to survive. Eventually, the infinite slaughterhouse of student bots yields a few that can tell an 8 from a 3 in a photo they’ve never seen before, with a level of accuracy that beats our human abilities. Welcome to the future!