What Does The Future Hold for AIs Now? Note: Grown-up language is used in the linked short story. Following up on the theme of a post by JoJo Stratton earlier, and in consideration of the potential results of #Recursion , the linked story came to mind. Its author, computer/cognitive scientist John McCarthy, penned it a decade ago, seven years before his death. (Scroll down, it's a scanned/OCR'd archive so there's odd whitespace.) Intended to be provocative, it touches on ideas first popularized by Isaac Asimov, and discussed widely in the last seventy years under the general theme of "Laws of Robotics". ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics ) Are there ethical limits to the capabilities we should allow AIs to acquire, or ways to ensure they are acquired only with these kinds of limitations on their use? Is it even possible to "build in" such limitations, as Asimov described? Finally, as the story forces us to ask: Will greed and/or polit...