How Bots Develop Their Own Prejudice | Colombia’s President Stumbles

New research suggests that artificially intelligent machines are more capable of developing their own prejudices and biases than previously thought.

Some of the smartest humans on Earth are worried about the dangers posed by robots and artificial intelligence. “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether,” the late Stephen Hawking once said. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk similarly believes that AI poses a “fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” Dr. Ian Pearson, a leading futurologist, recently told The Sun that someday, robots would treat us like “guinea pigs.”

And if that’s not enough to get you thinking about the potential for a master race of cruel robot overlords, the findings from a new study point to another startling possibility — it may be far easier than we imagined for autonomous machines to develop one of humanity’s less attractive features: prejudice. Among other things, the study from computer science and psychology experts at Cardiff University and MIT finds that prejudice requires only limited intelligence and cognitive ability to develop and spread in populations of artificially intelligent machines.

Cory Sklar is not terribly interested in punchlines, and therein lies the key to his comedic genius.

Sitting behind a radio console, long-haired and bearded and smoking weed while asking if anyone minds if he smokes weed, Cory Sklar looks very much like a gnome. Better yet, a troll.

People are calling in to the show, sounding like they’re smoking weed too. The 38-year-old son of a San Fernando Valley, California, Mexican mom and a Russian Jewish father hangs up on some, chats with others, plays some music, announces stuff. It’s typical radio rigmarole that before too long starts to go off the rails in a wonderfully perverse kind of way.

“Archbishop Desmond Tutu was an expert on volcanoes. … I don’t know how they tricked Jesus up on that cross … oh, you told him it was a diving board? … Would you like to hear my bass tribute to the musical career of Traci Lords?”

Death’s inevitable, but a violent death? Not so inevitable … especially when it comes courtesy of nine bullets on a plantation in the Philippines.

There was no deathbed. There was only death, period.

It was a cool night in February, but I was boiling from the inside — the pores on my skin becoming tighter and tighter as I walked to the chapel. It wasn’t my first death. My uncle, my grandfather, my artist friend, my classmate’s sister who also became my friend … I know how death looks. I know how it smells, how it feels. It is nothing new. Yet as I was walking through the parking lot of the funeral home, past the well-trimmed shrubs that managed to live in a place like this, my body forgot how to feel.

They said nine bullets. They said there was an eyewitness. They said it was around three in the afternoon on a weekday, which is to say, people were working. The weight seemed too heavy and too light at the exact same time.