Nor does a meteor know what it means to be an extinction event.

True but a meteor doesn't have to. As it has been written of in our sci-fi, the robot uprising specifically requires the machines to understand and, most of all, care, about dominance.

If you're talking about just being victims of machine logic, we've been suffering that since the invention of the traffic light traffic jam.

That's because fiction is fiction, especially one created for the masses must be written in terms masses can relate to.

As for reality, creating an AI that will actively hate us is a feat of about the same difficulty as creating an AI that would love us. Those are two opposite points of a tiny island called "has more-less human mind" that floats on a vast ocean named "we all die". The biggest challenge of surviving superhuman AIs is locating that island.

As the words of wisdom say, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

It may not need to understand or care. It may just be optimizing towards a goal, which involves 'humans need to die' or 'destroy/pollute the water supply', etc. It may indirectly cause serious damage without even awareness we exist.

Not yet.

As I understood this article, they're not even trying to. Their version of understanding isn't of the right sort.

I haven't heard of an AI system understanding that yet but it's a fairly common concept in everyday life for instance dogs tend to have masters. Anyone trying to make an AI understand everyday life or literature is going to have to deal with that.

I think the article speaks to this very point. The people "trying to make an AI understand" are not making it "understand" in the sense that you and I use most commonly use the term.

You're exactly right. If you look closely, present day A.I is modeled after the cortex. It's akin to cutting out the neo-cortex, wiring in i/o hooks, and reprogramming it to one's needs (weak A.I).

The cortical regions are good at creating hierarchical feature maps and we had a bunch of search algorithms laying around in the parts bin. Presto : Present day A.I.

This approach meshes well with 'big-data' companies in possession of large compute stacks and data-sets. So, its the direction things went.

A perfect opportunity for disruption.. The current wave is on borrowed time.