Human-computer symbiosis, or computers taking over?
In the earlier days of computer science (1990ties), when I was a post-doc at MIT, there was huge discussion among AI researchers, with people like Marvin Minsky on one side, who said that computers eventually would become smarter than humans, and the majority agreeing that this would never be possible. Fast-forward 25 years, and there is no question that Marvin Minsky was right. Researchers today envision one of three possible scenarios: the first, least fearsome one, that the human is telling the machine what to do, secondly, we have true human-machine symbiosis with computer and human being equal partners on a task, or third, the machine telling the human what to do. Looking at the current stock market fluctuations, it unfortunately seems we already firmly reached the third scenario, with computers taking over. When after multiyear growth and a record high of the Dow on January 26 2018, a few days later on February 4, the Dow lost 1175 points in a single day, this was its bigges...