Brace yourself. In these crucial weeks before the May release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, editors and writers are going to unleash an onslaught of think pieces about the real-life threat of artificial intelligence (AI). Whatever box office records the upcoming movie does or doesn’t break, it will offer yet another vision of AI insurgency, in the form of Ultron. Created to protect humanity from a variety of threats, the embittered, James Spader-voiced peacekeeping software decides to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just massacre all of us. It’s the latest, but certainly not the last time that Hollywood will turn the concept of AI superintelligence into action movie fodder. And for media outlets, it provides another opportunity to apply light reporting, and deeply furrowed brows, to the greatest problem in AI, that also happens to not be a problem at all.
More likely, the AI that hurts us will be very, very dumb.
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