What Stories Tell Us about Artificial Intelligence

Sometimes I wonder if our fear of A.I. is based more on science or on what we tell ourselves about it.  HAL 9000, Ultron, Aria, and Skynet have painted a picture for us that depicts one inevitable outcome: A.I. goes crazy and tries to kill us all.  But there is another side to the coin.  Tars, in Interstellar, and the computer in Star Trek, never pose any danger.  So which depiction is right?

There are really two questions we face with A.I.  First, how much can a computer mimic a human being?  Second, what kind of human being will it imitate?  I’m no A.I. expert, but it seems like we’re dealing with the mechanisms for imitation.  Just today, a story came out about how Microsoft’s A.I. chat bot started mimicking racist and anti-Semitic language on Twitter, presumably because it encountered it from others. 

The question becomes:  can we come up with an algorithm that mimics a kind of moral discernment, one that says “this kind of sentiment is bad; avoid imitating it”?  Will such an algorithm be enough?  If moral discernment is where the line is drawn between an A.I., no matter how advanced, and a human being, then perhaps we should heed warnings like that of Stephen Hawking.