Humankind is already losing control of AI. We need a plan by Hadas Gold - Commentary@ITREALMS

If you’re a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, or their movie and miniseries adaptations, you’ll have noticed the absence of something normally central to science fiction: computers. In Dune-lore, thousands of years before the events depicted in the main story, humans had become dependent on so-called ‘thinking machines’, which then got too big for their CPUs and attempted – quite successfully it turned out – to enslave humanity. Eventually humankind fought back and overthrew their mechanical masters, after which any such machine was outlawed.

What may have seemed utterly fantastical back in 1965, when Dune was first published, now feels much more plausible. The meteoric ascent of Artificial Intelligence has placed the rapidly developing technology on an apparent collision course with a human world where some hail it as a life changing technology, but many regard it with increasing suspicion and even alarm.