Ronald Bailey Asks Whether Superintelligent Machines Will Destroy Humanity

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In Frank Herbert's Dune books, humanity has long banned the creation of "thinking machines." Ten thousand years earlier, their ancestors destroyed all such computers in a movement called the Butlerian Jihad, because they felt the machines controlled them. The penalty for violating the Orange Catholic Bible's commandment "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" is immediate death. In the December 2014 issue of Reason,Ronald Bailey asks if humanity should sanction the creation of intelligent machines?