Riva-Melissa Tez doesn’t fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techno-utopian. For one thing, she makes eye contact. For another, she’s a woman in an overwhelmingly male sector. At 27, she is a cofounder of Permutation Ventures, an investment fund and incubator for companies hoping to harness artificial intelligence (when it arrives) for humanity’s betterment. Her atypical path to San Francisco’s futurist culture began in London, where she was born and where she spent four years in a homeless shelter. After studying philosophy at University College London (and cofounding a Notting Hill toy store), Tez moved to Berlin, where she was drawn to the transhumanist community, whose conception of the future seemed cribbed from science fiction: immortality, merging of machine and man, human engineering, etc. Tez—who has lectured on such topics at Stanford and Oxford—here explains why she expects nothing less, for herself and her fellow man, than super-health, super-longevity, and super-happiness.
Tell it to us straight: Are the robots going to take over? Are we engineering our own doom? You have systems right now that could potentially take down markets and start wars. There are huge risks. We just have to make sure people are thinking about using things like machine intelligence to improve the human condition. AI doesn’t have inherent goals, so the thing that poses the most risk is still the humans programming it.
How certain are you that we’ll ever achieve artificial intelligence? I’m probably more skeptical than most people in the field. Right now, we’re just building things that mimic certain aspects of learning, but we haven’t defined an overall principle of intelligence. In the early 20th century we wanted to build planes, so we looked at birds. We built flapping machines. We didn’t have a principle of flight, but then we worked out thermodynamics and the mechanics of lift, and we managed to build planes that work. The same thing is happening right now in AI.