How to call It?

Our artificial god

An option appears to present itself before us today through the dizzying perfectibility of artificial intelligence: a sort of super- performing (quantic?) computer having at its disposal all of the data collected upon earth and holding the capacity and power to seize and grasp all of the interactions and correlations of all these elements at the same time (this ability distinguishing artificial intelligence from the existing search engines), would receive the order to conceive of a rapid plan of action aiming to establish harmony and prosperity for all in a few years time. One would probably need to clearly mark out a number of “methods” which could not be contemplated by mankind, or else instruct it to conceive of several alternate plans, some of which would respect the current ethics and others which would ignore them. This objective – peace and prosperity for all – may perhaps be the highest one to which humanity as a whole would subscribe; it may be quite unrealistic to raise the bar higher. One would of course have first to agree on the foundations of the experiment and on guarantees and conditions of integrity, making sure for instance that no State or group of States would be favored, and setting up in advance a transparent protocol for the reading and diffusion of the results of the research.

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