SAN FRANCISCO: Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity.

“Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and moustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum,” a new exhibit on the controversial technology.

The pieces in this temporary show mix the disturbing with the comic, and this first display has AI disburse pithy observations to the visitors that cross into its line of vision.

“The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity,” said Audrey Kim, the show’s curator.

“But then the AI realizes that was bad and creates a type of memorial to the human, so our show’s tagline is ‘sorry for killing most of humanity,’” she said.

Artificial General Intelligence is a concept that is even more nebulous than the simple AI that is cascading into everyday life, as seen in the fast emergence of apps such as ChatGPT or Bing’s chatbot and all the hype surrounding them.

AGI is “artificial intelligence that is able to do anything that a human would be able to do”, integrating human cognitive capacities into machines.

All around San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, startups are hot on the trail of the AGI holy grail.

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2023