Thursday, January 12, 2017
Last Thoughts on AI
A thought
occurred to me as I was cycling home the other night:
It’s a fairly
well known idea – RNA was once king of the replicators on this planet –
inefficient as it was. Along comes DNA, a newly evolved molecule, owing its
existence no doubt to the building blocks of RNA, but immediately starts to
supplant RNA as king replicator. In fact, DNA uses RNA merely as an entity or a
platform on which it (DNA) replicates itself much more effectively and
efficiently than RNA ever did. Poor old RNA is relegated to the role of
molecular scaffold.
In the same
way, people fear, at some point human beings will manage to “construct” and
artificial intelligence which will turn out to be a competitor to our own
intelligence, and, having been created, nurtured, taught and put forth into the
world, will turn around and supplant human beings as the dominant
intelligence/life form on the planet. What role human beings play in that new
order I suppose is up for interesting science fiction style discussion.
Maybe, as
in Iain M Banks' “Culture” novels, we’ll be equal partners with benevolent
machine intellects, who value a bit of human input every so often in decisions,
but are anyway, way too highly evolved, and way too busy enjoying themselves in
higher intellectual dimensions to ever want to bother being mean to humans.
Or maybe we
become the “RNA” of the new world – outdated, outmoded, surpassed, and useful
only in as much as we can be put to work as a platform, or constructing the
platform on which the new machine intelligence(s) can thrive. “Human slaves in
an AI nation” kind of thing. There’s an old “Tharg’s Future Shock” from 2000AD,
in which humans exist only to server at petrol stations for automated sentient
cars….!
Or maybe
the new AI is a hybrid of machine intelligence augmenting human brain capacity
– Alistair Reynolds has written a great trilogy in which humanity has
splintered into different sub-sections – one of them being the “Conjoiners” who
accept nano-technological upgrades to baseline human brains, and hence become
hyper intelligent (and incidentally are completely spurned by the rest of
humanity who reject the use of nanotechnology). In a really nice twist, when
conjoiners start putting really significant amounts of hardware in their heads,
they have to construct large cooling fins on their heads like coxcombs to
dissipate the heat that their nano-implants generate.
Or maybe
the new superior machine AI just wipes out humanity as a threat – that’s probably the
most common sci-fi scenario – Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, Frankenstein. There's also the idea that we'll be providing some form of slave labour, as in The Matrix, Colossus, or in the original series Star Trek episode "The Apple". The ultimate irony of the human being’s main source of pride,
the great ape brain, managing to construct and architect the means of its own
usurpation in the form of an artificial and improved intellect superior to its
own……..
But then it
occurred to me – in a sense, it wouldn’t matter if the “artificial
intelligence” was actually conscious of itself taking over the world and e.g.
wiping out all of humanity. For example, imagine a new virus is discovered (in
the wild, or created in a lab) that completely wiped out all human beings –
well, it wouldn’t be conscious of that – all it would be doing it what ANY
replicator does – replicates itself in the only way it can. As a side effect to
that, humanity reaches an untimely and unpleasant end. To fit the bill
“artificial intelligence” all it would have to be is man-made.
Then I
thought – well, actually, a replicator, or an intelligence, doesn’t even have
to be organic, does it? And in a sense, even the tides of the sea could be
said, in a “blind watchmaker” sense, to be “intelligent” in that the waves
grade and segregate pebbles on a beach, as if it were an intelligent entity
with that goal in “mind”.
And then I
realised, that an “artificial intelligence”, at least one that might have a
negative impact on the future of humanity, wouldn’t even need to be
“intelligent”, or “conscious” or even intentionally made as such. It might just
be a meme, or an idea, or some form of construct. But one with pathological
consequences for human beings. Indeed it might even be a construct, with
pathological consequences for human being, that is currently USING human
beings, as instruments, or as its own platform, to play out its own
pathological consequences…….merely because that’s what it was designed to do.
Which is
when I realised that human beings created exactly the monster of our own demise
over 150 years ago, when the corporate “personal” entity was constructed and
enshrined in law.
That is,
the legal vehicle of the corporate entity, with its “personal” legal rights,
it’s in built requirements of fiduciary responsibility to maximise profit, and
the brilliantly subtle way that its very existence is protected in law, and its
success, reinforces its existence. The corporate gene pool in which is must
swim and survive mean we’ve had over 150 years of a corporate evolution to
guarantee that today, only the most psychotic of corporate entities can or have
survived. And the awesome, subtle beauty of it is that this legal
construct/vehicle uses human beings to effect its own continuation and
replication.
And at the
moment we are heading full tilt towards global climate breakdown and
catastrophe because this highly evolved corporate construct, using humans as
it’s serfs, slaves, platform, is still careening down the road of maximising
profit, regardless of the longer term consequences, even for its own welfare,
never mind humanity’s.
I think
that fits the bill as a world ending, Armageddon generating, ‘artificial’
‘intelligence’ (if you will) in anyone’s book.
# posted by Flann O'Brien @ 12:25 PM
