Artificial Intelligence Is Just a Story, and We Can Tell a Better One (Jaron Lanier)

Amazon has recently confirmed reports that its home operating system "Alexa," has been spontaneously laughing for no apparent reason, occasionally refusing to obey commands, and sometimes performing actions that were never asked for. No one has any idea why — is this a bug? A glitch? A hacker attack? — but internet pioneer and Microsoft researcher Jaron Lanier is probably not surprised. In his 2017 book Dawn of the New Everything, Lanier points out the startling degree to which these home operating systems — not just Amazon's but from every company on the market — visually resemble "HAL," the AI system in 2001: A Space Odyssey which cannot process conflicting missions and turns homicidal.