AI Pretending To Be Dimwitted Is Worrisome, Especially For Self-Driving Cars

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

Advances in AI will presumably enable AI to become increasingly astute, but will humans be willing to accept AI that is nearly as smart as mankind or possibly even smarter? Perhaps we will all opt to throttle back the AI so that it remains less capable than humans.

But, could the AI perchance secretly realize that humans are going to likely put in place such hurdles, and if so, the AI might be sharp enough to proactively pretend to be dimwitted to avert being otherwise capped.

Wow, what a scenario.

To be clear, AI is not yet akin to human intelligence and the odds are that we are a long way distant from the promise of such vaunted capabilities. Those touting the use of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) are hoping that the advent of ML/DL might be a path toward full AI, though right now ML/DL is mainly a stew of computationally impressive pattern matching and we don’t know if it will scale-up to anything approaching an equivalent of the human brain.