Poopocalypse
Is Singularity scaring the living daylight out of you? Dreading the day we need to take orders from our Robot Overlords? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet: meet the Poopocalypse.
In August 2016, Jesse Newton from Arkansas shared a story on Facebook - a tale on unintended consequences. One night just after midnight his puppy Evie pooped in the living room - a small accident that can happen, although she hadn't done this before. The trouble is, at 00:30 every night Jesse's Roomba vacuum cleaner wakes up to vacuum the living room - and meticulously spread out the dog pooh across the entire room as part of the process. Jesse only noticed it when his four-year-old crawled in his bed smelling like dog pooh, went down to discover that his living room looked like a 'Jackson Pollock poop painting'. A spokesman of iRobot, the makers of Roomba, said they are aware of the issue, and faeces based image recognition or other sensors might be able to solve the issue.
The story above is ofcourse a bit of a silly internet meme - but it is actually a good example of a deeper issue with advanced technology and existential risk: people are notoriously bad at i) specifying what it is they want and ii) overseeing unintended consequences.
One of the earliest stories around this was the legend of King Midas. In return for finding a lost satyr, he could make a wish, and he asked that everything he touched would turn into gold. After playing a bit with his new powers by turning roses in his garden into gold, it was time for a drink - but the drink turned into gold. Then his daughter came in asking what what up with the gold roses - he touched her and she turned into gold as well.
Likewise, philosophers such as Nick Bostrom warn the same lessons apply to technology, especially for intelligent optimization technologies such as AI. He introduces the Paperclip Optimizer as a though experiment (see also here), a system that is given the fairly innocent goal to make as many paperclips as possible. However, without proper constraints or further objectives being set, humans might be seen as a useful source of iron.
So beware what you wish for!
