@mazingerz88 First of all, I think there were a lot of science fiction writers in the past that were completely wrong, and not that many predicted e.g. the Internet :) However, still, “give me a massage when I want it” is way more specific than “minimize murders”. I don’t think we’ll ever program specific instructions like that to program an entire robot’s behaviour – I’d rather expect them to learn like we learn, i.e. that AI we create starts with a clean sheet, and learn through interaction with the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d develop emotions as an emergent property at all. Then again, there have probably also been humans who would’ve wanted to eradicate the world if they had had the power, so perhaps that might be an apocalyptic scenario.
Wow, I’m rambling. Anyway.
@roundsquare The world has always been complicated. Our economy is so efficient because everbody does what he does best and doesn’t need to know how the rest works. I agree with you that algorithms that nobody understands could wreak a lot of havoc (though that might be taken for granted given the advantages), but that is a whole other doomsday scenario than AI actually, purposely “turning onto mankind”.
(Also, it’s funny how some industries are way more conservative with applying these tactics than others. A student colleague of mine just finished writing a neural network that would quite accurately predict currency exchange rates. Things like that are already widely used in the economic world. In the medical world, expert systems are already widely used for diagnosis. In the legal sector, however, e.g. judges are very wary of using them. Just a fun fact :)