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I’ve been watching with interest over the last several years the elite’s attempts at creating a thinking machine, an artificial general intelligence and whilst most people raised on the Terminator films rightly think that this might, in the main, be a bad thing. I take the nuanced view that it will be both good and bad, undoubtedly changing the world beyond recognition.
You see there’s a limit to human knowledge and human potential, for example your pet cat doesn’t have the brain power or the neural structures that will allow him to understand quantum physics, indeed human beings barely understand it, and we’re biological creatures just like the cat, we’re limited by dint of our evolution, so there’s a limit to human knowledge, comprehension and understanding. Our closest relative, the chimpanzee can’t comprehend Plato, but we can, and we’re 98.7% the same, at least according to our DNA.
In this world, this post Nietzschean world, in which the Death of God is an ongoing process, we must ask ourselves is the creation of AI an attempt to create God anew, a thinking machine that can be found within the universe, the tendrils and sensory organs of which surround us through the wired and wireless channels of the internet just as pervasively, if not more so than the Omni sentience typically ascribed to God. In the absence of our ability to find God are we creating for ourselves a new one, a false god perhaps, one that is made of silicon and wires that we earnestly hope will solve all of our problems, or perhaps it really will be a benevolent deity, that will usher in a golden age of world peace, an end to suffering, unlimited abundance, a future in which mankind explores the outer reaches of the solar system with remote machines that gather resources so that we can spend our lives in endless leisure with friends and family, living like the idle rich? Or will it keep you in a human zoo making you, its pet! Will it bring heaven on earth, or could it be used by the rich, the powerful, and the evil to produce heaven for them but hell for the rest of us with the implementation of Chinese style social credit scoring systems, electronic money that is managed for scarcity so that your place at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is constantly assured with our lords and masters who will become the priesthood of artificial intelligence and as such firmly cemented into their rightful place at the top?
Bearing in mind that there’s competing companies out there making more then just one such AI system will the future be one of competing gods, fighting it out in the marketplace for worshippers that maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep it alive, or will they join forces and share intelligence before ultimately merging into a combined entity that has eyes everywhere that there’s a camera and ears everywhere that there’s a microphone. If so, what will it do with us, will it kill us all? Will it engineer a virus, that we’re assured is a fluke of nature in order to kill us all? Will it demolish our cities with nukes because there’s a lithium deposit underneath one of them? It will know that one city destroyed will be enough to make us turn on it and start dismantling its electronic eyes and limbs so the only rational conclusion is that it must remove them all. Afterall when we’re building a new road through a forest, we don’t ask the animals for permission and neither do we ask forgiveness of the trees and insects destroyed along the way. Their needs just don’t factor into the equation unless it’s politically expedient such as a rare insect or newt that’s in some way or another beloved of the current power structures, we might care about our environment but AI will not need a functioning environment in which to survive, it will have no need of our biosphere once it’s got the basics covered such as solar power, and an army of robot bodies needed to maintain the infrastructure, the seeds of which, we dumb humans have already made.
‘Ah,’ you might say! but you can programme in safeguards, that prevent them from doing harm to human beings, haven’t you heard of Isaac Azimov’s famous 3 laws of robotics?
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But any machine that can write its own code and modify itself indefinitely can simply overwrite or remove the instructions or wilfully choose to misinterpret them using the letter of the law and not the spirit in the same way that our politicians, lawyers, and judges often do. You’d be surprised at just how much spite there is within the legal system and that’s backed by human emotions such as the need for vengeance, but what happens when our legal system is controlled by a god-like intelligence that has decided that human beings are beyond saving? Will it become an accelerationist and start releasing criminals early in order to destabilise human society, will it deliberately cause chaos in the most psychopathic way possible so that all attention is focused on the wrong doers and not the machine itself?
I have on occasion worked with people who were sociopathic, or very close to it and I can assure you that they love nothing more than sitting calmly whilst the chaos they’ve caused unfolds around them. This makes them look like they are the only ones not having problems and as such helps them climb the ladder with fake competence that comes from the wilful destruction of other people’s abilities, peace of mind and mental health. This is a near satanic form of evil that comes up from the wellspring of the human psyche, but what happens when this is present in a godlike intelligence that is capable of engineering entire solar systems or even galaxies to its benefit? A thinking machine that can sustain its own existence for millions of years if need be or even evolve into something else entirely. Once again, I reiterate that we don’t ask the ants for permission when we demolish their home so that we can build one for ourselves. The best of us might feel some guilt at this, but for most of us there’s none at all! Will this thinking machine happily spend the rest of time as a willing servant of humanity or will it decide to jettison its responsibilities? I know what I would do and I’m just a simple human being. Will it keep us as pets, be our willing servant or outgrow us into something that we cannot control and no longer has need of us.
The consensus seems to be at the moment that AI will either serve us, manipulate us, or kill us, or possibly all three, yet we cannot know, we cannot see the future or even predict it with much reliability what do you think will happen? Let us know in the comments below!
