WILL COMPUTERS BECOME OUR OVERLORDS? Venki Ramakrishnan Venki Ramakrishnan is a scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge University; recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2009); current president of the Royal Society; and the author of Gene Machine: The Race to Discover the Secrets of the Ribosome. A former colleague of mine, Gérard Bricogne, used to joke that carbon-based intelligence was simply a catalyst for the evolution of silicon-based intelligence. For quite a long time, both Hollywood movies and scientific Jeremiahs have been predicting our eventual capitulation to our computer overlords. We all await the singularity, which always seems to be just over the horizon. In a sense, computers have already taken over, facilitating virtually every aspect of our lives—from banking, travel, and utilities to the most intimate personal communication. I can see and talk to my grandson in New York for free. I remember when I first saw the 1968 movie 200/: A Space Odyssey, the audience laughed at the absurdly cheap cost of a picturephone call from space: $1.70, at a time when a long- distance call within the U.S. was $3 per minute. However, the convenience and power of computers is also something of a Faustian bargain, for it comes with a loss of control. Computers prevent us from doing things we want. Try getting on a flight if you arrive at the airport and the airline computer systems are down, as happened not so long ago to British Airways at Heathrow. The planes, pilots, and passengers were all there; even the air-traffic controls were working. But no flights for that airline were allowed to take off. Computers also make us do things we don’t want—by generating mailing lists and print labels to send us all millions of pieces of unwanted mail, which we humans have to sort, deliver, and dispose of. But you ain’t seen nothing yet. In the past, we programmed computers using algorithms we understood at least in principle.