Does A.I. Need a Constitution?

“Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it’s grown up, you should worry,” Geoffrey Hinton, the seventy-eight-year-old Nobel Prize-winning godfather of A.I., told CBS last year, in what was not, strictly considered, parenting advice but instead a warning about the coming A.I. apocalypse. Then he got an idea. What if A.I. isn’t our baby, li’l Terminator T-600, swaddled in a titanium exoskeleton? What if we’re its baby? “Mothers genuinely care about their babies,” Hinton told CNN, as if slightly astonished by the milk of human kindness, and so it ought to be possible to stop artificially intelligent machines from annihilating Homo sapiens if tech companies can program them to have a maternal instinct.