The threat of artificial intelligence is not that robots are like us. The problem, according to scientists, is their inhumanity: we cannot make them care about justice or equality.
And while talk of AI and robotics may conjure up images of human-like machines such as Hal 9000 or Wall-E, that is a category error, says Joanna Bryson, a computer science professor from the University of Bath, who says the technology has simply “become more human-looking”.
“There’s no way we can make AI care about the sanctions of human justice,” she says. The humans who designed the technology must ultimately take responsibility for it. That means regulation must catch up to hold programmers to account for their creations.