Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

Summary

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may be one of the major top­ics of our his­tor­i­cal moment, but it can be sur­pris­ing­ly tricky to define. In the more than 30-year-old inter­view clip above, Isaac Asi­mov describes arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as “a phrase that we use for any device that does things which, in the past, we have asso­ci­at­ed only with human intel­li­gence.” At one time, not so very long before, “only human beings could alpha­bet­ize cards”; in the machines that could even then do it in a frac­tion of a sec­ond, “you’ve got an exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.” Not that humans were ever espe­cial­ly good at card alpha­bet­i­za­tion, nor at arith­metic: “the cheap­est com­put­er in the world can mul­ti­ply and divide more accu­rate­ly than we can.” You could see arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as a kind of fron­tier, then, which moves for­ward as com­put­er­ized machines take over the tasks humans pre­vi­ous­ly had to do them­selves. “Every indus­try, the gov­ern­ment itself, tax-col­lect­ing agen­cies, air­planes: every­thing depends on com­put­ers. We have per­son­al com­put­ers in the home, and they are con­stant­ly get­ting bet­ter, cheap­er, more ver­sa­tile, capa­ble of doing more things, so that we can look into the future, when, for the first time, human­i­ty in gen­er­al will be freed from all kinds of work that’s real­ly an insult to the human brain.” Such work “requires no great thought, no great cre­ativ­i­ty. Leave all that to the com­put­er, and we can leave to our­selves those things that com­put­ers can’t do.” This inter­view was shot for Isaac Asi­mov’s Visions of the Future, a tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary that aired in 1992, the last year of its sub­jec­t’s life. One won­ders what Asi­mov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al intel­li­gence as com­ple­men­tary, rather than in com­pe­ti­tion. “They work togeth­er,” he argues. “Each sup­plies the lack of the oth­er. And in coop­er­a­tion, ...