Greg Egan on AI

In an interview with Renai LeMay at Keeping the Door:"When we do finally grope our way towards some tangible results [in creating artificially intelligent consciousness], I hope we proceed slowly and carefully, because this has the potential to lead to a lot of suffering.

The present generation of humans emerged out of hundreds of millions of years of animals tearing each other’s throats out, and tens of thousands of years of people being prey to famine and disease. We might aspire to do much better than that, but creating an entirely new kind of intelligence that’s happy with its own place in the world is an incredibly daunting prospect."

Related: AI in fiction; stories of Greg Egan.