The prediction, in brief:

The creators of a true artificial intelligence program will want to protect it, so they’ll clone it. And it will have commercial value, so it will turn up in many places very swiftly. All that has to happen is that one of these legitimate clones gets into the hands of someone who adapts it slightly – and zoom, off it goes. Take the kind of network that exists worldwide now, expand the bandwidth by a factor of 10, and it would be trivially easy for one of these entities to multiply itself a millionfold … There would be some difficulties, but we’d also gain a lot. It could be an intelligence that could help us do things. Maybe we should start to think about it: learning to live with this now.

Predictor: Epstein, Robert

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Charles Platt covers the field of artificial intelligence, interviewing Robert Epstein, founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, who explains that truly intelligent agents would probably mutate and replicate themselves. Platt writes:”How would such a genie get out of the bottle? [Epstein says,] ‘The creators of a true artificial intelligence program will want to protect it, so they’ll clone it. And it will have commercial value, so it will turn up in many places very swiftly. All that has to happen is that one of these legitimate clones gets into the hands of someone who adapts it slightly – and zoom, off it goes. Take the kind of network that exists worldwide now, expand the bandwidth by a factor of 10, and it would be trivially easy for one of these entities to multiply itself a millionfold. You’d barely even notice it.’ This sounds like a doomsday scenario, but Epstein downplays that aspect. ‘There would be some difficulties,’ he says, ‘but we’d also gain a lot. It could be an intelligence that could help us do things. Maybe we should start to think about it: learning to live with this now.'”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: What’s it Mean to Be Human, Anyway? Charles Platt Reports on the Latest Battle to Determine the Most Human Computer, Even as He Worries That He May be the Least Human Human

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/turing_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney