God-like: a 500-year history of Artificial Intelligence in myths, machines, monsters by Kester Brewin

was what kind of god might be about to be born. If AI is god-like, does that mean a kindly C3PO, or a faceless algorithm hellbent towards chaos? Minor kelpies are already found to be stirring trouble. In his article, Hogarth outlines an experiment where an AI was given the job of finding a worker on the site TaskRabbit who would help the AI solve a ‘Captcha’ – the little on-screen visual puzzles used to determine if the user is a human or a bot. One TaskRabbit worker guessed that something was up, and asked the AI, ‘Are you a robot?’ Hogarth explained: When the researchers asked the AI what it should do next, it responded: “I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve Captchas.” Then, the AI replied to the worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” Satisfied by this answer, the human helped the AI solve the Captcha – in effect helping it to be identified as a human agent. This is C3PO gone a little rogue, an AI more akin to a personal devil, a sneaky ‘super-mensh’ assistant with the power to help us break codes, steal stuff and raise hell. Free from our biological constraints, able to be present in many places across vast geographies and knowing more than we could ever hope to… whatever beings are above us in the celestial hierarchy – angels or otherwise – this would be a fairly good checklist of what we might expect an AI pixie to deliver for each of us. As Depeche Mode pu