High technologies can contribute to the emergence and support of despotic regimes, said Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher and director of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Man, in an interview with Lente.ru.
According to him, this can happen if such a regime gets into the hands of advanced means of monitoring the population, strong artificial intelligence or innovative developments in the field of robotics.
Bostrom noted that if now a dictator needs to enlist the support of the military and the elites in order to maintain power, then one can imagine how in the future authoritarian rulers will be able to use these funds to govern the country as part of a small group - a maximum of ten people. He noticed that the same technologies can be used for good.
Bostrom also expressed the view that the development of artificial superintelligence is not an unambiguous threat to humans. The philosopher sees strong AI rather as a portal through which humanity will have to go on the way to progress. “The question is not whether we should take this step. We just have to make sure that when we get to this line, we will cross it as carefully and responsibly as possible, pass through this portal, and not crash against the wall,”he said.
Bostrom came to Russia for an international cybersecurity congress organized by Sberbank, which took place on July 5-6 in Moscow. In addition to him, representatives of large Russian and foreign IT companies spoke at the event. The Congress was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During a speech at the event, the head of Sberbank, German Gref, spoke about modern cyber threats, and in particular about the attack on the computer systems of the Federal Center for Neurosurgery in Tyumen at the time of a serious operation. According to him, the incident occurred a few days ago during a complex brain surgery on a 13-year-old patient. During the surgical intervention, medical devices were turned off due to hacking. The head physician of the center, Albert Sufianov, managed to complete the operation without relying on electronic indicators.
