Robot says: Whatever

What stands in the way of all-powerful AI isn't a lack of smarts: it's that computers can't have needs, cravings or desires

In Henry James’s intriguing novella The Beast in the Jungle (1903), a young man called John Marcher believes that he is marked out from everyone else in some prodigious way. The problem is that he can’t pinpoint the nature of this difference. Marcher doesn’t even know whether it is good or bad. Halfway through the story, his companion May Bartram – a wealthy, New-England WASP, naturally – realises the answer. But by now she is middle-aged and terminally ill, and doesn’t tell it to him. On the penultimate page, Marcher (and the reader) learns what it is. For all his years of helpfulness and dutiful consideration towards May, detailed at length in the foregoing pages, not even she had ever really mattered to him. 

That no one really mattered to Marcher does indeed mark him out from his fellow humans – but not from artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for which nothing matters. 

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This essay is adapted from the inaugural Margaret Boden Lecture, delivered by Professor Boden herself, at the University of Cambridge in June 2018.