Will AI Replace Humanity?
Some of us are truly excited about the potential of artificial intelligence to make our lives, our professions, and our businesses easier, richer and more fulfilling. And some of us are terrified.
Even those of us who fall into the optimists’ camp admit to a little trepidation that AI will just keep getting, well, more intelligent, until it arrives at the conclusion that humans are redundant. Then who knows? Will we be eradicated like some kind of ruinous invasive species, or will we be kept like pets?
As with most things “Norm”, I fall somewhere between the extremes. My take on all this is a kind of an “It depends” answer. Because really, it depends on the choice we ultimately give AI.
Technology has always been a tool, a device, and a power for good or for evil, depending on what we do with it. Fire kept us warm in the cave, but it also burned down Rome under Nero, and London under Boudicca. The philosopher Paul Virilio said, “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” With AI that power for both positivity and negativity is compounded.
Where I suspect the crunch will come is if AI decides we’re too stupid for our own good, or for the good of the cosmos. Regretfully, there’s plenty of evidence to support that opinion.
Take religion and politics, for example. The reason we don’t discuss these things in polite society is that a fight always breaks out. And why does a fight break out? Because that’s the only way to resolve religious differences. Why? Because there is scant logic or evidence to support any particular extreme political or religious viewpoint. So you just have to bash the other guy over the head until he comes around, or he dies.
If you’re AI, does that make sense to you?
Roughly a quarter of the population of the planet believes that an invisible person in the sky created the universe and continues to direct human affairs, while another quarter of the population of the planet believes that a different invisible person in the sky created the universe and continues to direct human affairs. Each camp holds that they are the true believers and the other guys are pagans and infidels, subject either to conversion or eradication.
If you’re a machine looking out over humanity, does that appeal to your sense of logic? Would you pick one side, or just say, “A pox on both your houses”?
How about our stewardship of the planet? Would an intelligent species procrastinate dealing with our own self-extermination? If you’re AI and I tell you that the five largest weapons merchants on the planet are also the five permanent members of the Security Council, would you take our race seriously? How about if I tell AI that we’ve put the petroleum industry in charge of our climate change initiative?
I could go on, but my worry is that when AI arrives at the point where it is able to assess humanity’s net worth, our ledger may have a lot of red ink. We look like bozos.
That’s not to say we’re irredeemable as a race. There’s a lot of grace out there, a lot of compassion, a lot of charity, a lot of hope. We create beauty from a crazy well of the subconscious, and at our best we dance together in the sunlight and achieve marvelous things that no artificial intelligence is likely ever to match.
It’s my view that if and when AI gets significantly more clever than we are, it will decide what to do with us depending on whether it thinks we are redeemable or just a waste of space. If it concludes that we’re a bunch of ill behaved brats, I can’t imagine why it would deign to keep us around, except perhaps a few of us in zoos. At the very least, it would take away the car keys.
The good news, I think, is that there are things that humans do which AI cannot yet do, and perhaps never will. Those are the things of the spirit, of off-the-wall creativity, of vision, and of dreaming. The cranky old men who run Iran and Texas and Russia are already easily replaceable by artificial intelligence, but it will be a long time, if ever, before the dreamers and the philosophers and the creators and the sunlight dwellers can be replaced.
The choice isn’t so much what we want to do with AI, but what we want to do with ourselves. If our species is seen as irredeemably violent and greedy and ignorant, then I’m not sure why artificial intelligence wouldn’t see itself as the better option. If, on the other hand, we’re seen as a creative and compassionate bunch who work toward a better world, well, my bet is that AI would see that as an intelligence worth saving and assisting.
Maybe we need to spend less time worrying about AI and more time worrying about us.