Roman Yampolskiy: Every Technology Has Both Negative and Positive Effects!

Roman V. Yampolskiy is an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering and Director at the Cybersecurity Lab of the University of Louisville. He is also an alumnus of Singularity University (GSP2012) and a visiting fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Dr. Yampolskiy is a well known researcher with a more holistic point of view, stressing the perils as much as the promises of exponential technology. Thus I was happy to bring him on Singularity 1 on 1 to try and bring some balance to our views of the future. During our conversation with Roman we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: our shared experience of growing up behind the Iron Curtain; his personal motivation and main goals; why he disagrees with Marvin Minsky on the progress made in Artificial Intelligence; why he loves the “brute force” approach to AI; the Turing Test and its implications for humanity; Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics; Hugo de Garis and the Artilect War; Samuel Butler and Ted Kaczynski; his upcoming book Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach; the chances for a “soft” or “hard” take-off of the technological singularity…