AI delivers the results of our Google searches, as well as serving us ads based on those searches. AI has helped people with brain injuries operate robotic arms and decipher verbal thoughts into audible words. We have relied on AI to tell us what television shows to watch and where to dine. Most of us have encountered scripted, artificially intelligent customer service bots whose main purpose seems to be forestalling conversations with actual humans.

It turns out, then, that the most significant takeaway from a letter warning of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence might be its insistence that AI systems “must do what we want them to do.” And what is that? Even now, just six years later, that list is too long to catalog. The goal, according to Musk, is a future “controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth- that’s obviously gonna be the future that we want.” His brain-chip company, Neuralink, aims to merge the brain with artificial intelligence, not only to develop life-changing medical applications for people with spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders, but, eventually, for everyone, to create a kind of hive mind. Musk, meanwhile, is pursuing more than just AI-equipped self-driving cars. While most are academics, the signers also include researchers at Palantir, the secretive surveillance firm that helps ICE round up undocumented immigrants the leaders of Vicarious, an industrial robotics company that boasts reductions for its clients of more than 50 percent in labor hours-which is to say, work performed by humans and the founders of Sentient Technologies, who had previously developed the language-recognition technology used by Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, and whose company has since been folded into Cognizant, a corporation that provided some of the underpaid, overly stressed workforce tasked with “moderating” content on Facebook.

More than eight thousand people have now signed that letter. In 2015 a cohort of well-known scientists and entrepreneurs including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Steve Wozniak issued a public letter urging technologists developing artificial intelligence systems to “research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.” To that end, they wrote, “We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.”

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