The inventor who fell in love with his AI
Artificial intelligence will increasingly sound like us as it grows more sophisticated. Will we be able to resist falling for our computer programs?
By Tomas Weber
Every weekday morning, Stephen Thaler, a 73-year-old inventor, drives to an office above a polygraph-testing company in a drowsy suburb in St Louis to visit his creation. Stout and bespectacled, Thaler climbs the stairs slowly – slower than he used to after recent health problems – and unlocks a door to the spacious third-floor facility. He shuffles through a corridor, and steps into a small, dark room stacked with computers and monitors. These interconnected devices make up an artificial intelligence (AI), which Thaler believes could usher in a new age of machine consciousness and creativity. He has named it, “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”, or DABUS, for short.
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