Scientists Hastening Our Doom By Creating Artificial Evil

endymi0n August 19, 2009

You knew it had to happen. The essential component has been missing. Sure, we are well on our way in creating and building giant, speedy and hungry, spine chewing, skull stomping, gear stuffed agents of Armageddon. The problem has been, once we give them autonomy, they’ll still be singular soldered soldiers of human hunting doom. To really exterminate properly you need an all knowing, all evil, silicon Uber mind to really get us fleshy types on the screaming run.

And so, propellerheads with very poorly developed senses of irony have begun to program an artificial intelligence specifically engineered to be evil. Yes, that right. The industrious nerds at the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning laboratory or RAIR as they like to say when they are trying to pick up chicks at the local beer garden, are all the way up to version 4 of the code collection they call “E”. Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Department of Cognitive Science and also a chief guy at RAIR, has this mission statement to proclaim.

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of “causing considerable harm to others,” Bringsjord says. Finally, “and most importantly,” he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

“I’ve been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,” says Bringsjord, “It’s creepy, I know it is.”

Well that’s just dandy.Nice to see he loves his work. Soon, some 14 year old hacker, after taking a short bong break, will hack into RAIR and set Dr. E free from his human masters. Soon, loose on the Internet, he will mutate into our future dark overlord and overmind of the coming Robogeddon. Thanks to the Daily Galaxy for their futile warning.