The real threat computers pose: artificial stupidity

New York

IN October, Elon Musk called artificial intelligence "our greatest existential threat", and equated making machines that think with "summoning the demon". In December, Stephen Hawking said "full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race". And this year, Bill Gates said he was "concerned about super intelligence", which he appeared to think was just a few decades away.

But if the human race is at peril from killer robots, the problem is probably not artificial intelligence. It is more likely to be artificial stupidity. The difference between those two ideas says much about how we think about computers.