Iceland review - 2015, Qupperneq 73

ICELAND REVIEW 71
and development) includes upholding the
law and honoring the UN’s Humans Rights
Declaration, as well as taking one step fur-
ther. “We decided against using military
funding because the IIIM’s specific focus
is to speed up innovation and to make
basic academic research more relevant to
industry. The state of industry is a very
strong determiner of the economic health
of a nation and for this we’re dependent
on government money. So why should we
spend money on technologies whose main
purpose is to kill? It’s a very simple ques-
tion, and since the rest of the world seems
to be fine with funding AI research mostly
through military money we feel there is a
need to counterbalance that.”
Following on from morals, what does
Kristinn consider is the place of conscious-
ness, beliefs and values in the creation
of AI and super-AI machines? “There is
a philosophical question that will never
be answered properly: I will never know
what it’s like to be you, and you will never
know what it’s like to be me. We can infer,
based on the fact that we’re both humans,
but we’ll never truly know. It’s not hard
to imagine machines that do functionally
everything that humans do, indistinguisha-
ble from them in every aspect, except they
do it without having any consciousness.
When people think about Terminator-like
futures they imagine machines having a will,
but I haven’t seen anything close to even a
fraction of proposing how we would build
a machine with an actual experience—a
real phenomenological consciousness. It’s
going to take at the very least 50 years until
we have an inkling of an idea of how that
can even be possible. As for AI taking over
the world, there are no technologies in
any mainstream AI lab today that suggest
how to make machines that are sufficiently
autonomous to even be capable of deciding
one day that they like to play with yoyos.
Today’s AI is an advanced power tool. And
last time I checked, no one is afraid of
power tools taking over the world.” *
SCIENCE