Take a good look at that guy, he is the face of Evil. Well he’s at least the computer generated face of E, an artificial intelligence specifically programed to be … evil.
Yes, this does immediately make everyone say, “why?” which leads to the obvious answer, “for science!” Selmer Bringsjord of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created E in 2005 to study what makes people do evil things, a noble cause for sure, but now E has his own virtual world to exist in (read: conquer).
“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 doesn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling but at least he knows it. E will continue to be developed and will next learn to communicate in simple English (read: no slang) with the hopes that some day it will be used to analyze information gained on potential terrorists.
So what about the thing we’re all concerned with, when does this guy turn into the Matrix? Bringsjord says he wouldn’t think of releasing E into the world, even purely virtual environments like Second Life without “engineering safeguards” that would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” to prevent him from harming humans.
“Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,” he says, “E will be controlled.”
Yeah, we’re all dead. Better read this link from Scientific American before it’s too late.
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