Commentary: Use AI to stop carnage

Twice again, on a single weekend of woe, many were shot dead in the United States, and many are left maimed. It’s often claimed that the prime cause of such bloodshed isn’t the availability of guns and the lack of such things as better background checks and tighter controls on high-powered rifles and large magazines, but rather the deranged and devilish humans who decide to shoot the innocent. Oppositely, it’s often claimed that the chief problem is the availability of guns (at least high-powered ones) and the laxity of checks. The volume of this long-standing clash will inevitably climb higher and higher, and blare throughout the election cycle now underway, but let’s face the dark music: on our current trajectory, next to nothing will be done - and even if by some miracle something policy-wise emerges from a partial compromise, we will have no reliable defense against mass shootings like the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, in which military-grade guns that can’t be obtained in France without the equivalent of FBI-level clearance were legally purchased in Slovakia, smuggled in and ruthlessly and premeditatedly unleashed upon journalists in Paris. Yet there is a solution, a technological alternative to the fruitless shouting match between politicians: namely, AI - of an ethical sort. Guns that are at once intelligent and ethically correct can put an end to the mass-shooting carnage. Consider the rifle apparently used by the human killer in the El Paso Walmart shooting. But now suppose that time is turned back to before his shots were fired on Aug. 3, and that his rifle, radically unlike the stupid one that killed, is both intelligent and ethical. This alternate-future rifle would know that it’s approaching the Walmart by car and would accordingly know that it has no business being used anytime soon. Move forward in time...