We need to prevent artificial intelligence from taking us over. Any suggestions?
(The following is a slightly expanded version of a letter I recently sent my children, nieces and nephews, who are of course in no way responsible for its contents or tone.)
Dear children, nieces and nephews,
Because of my grave concern for the state of the world you and your children will inherit, I wanted to suggest that you all take very seriously that, despite everything else that seems threatening today, and there is a lot, far and away the biggest and most ominous problem we face is AI.
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We will soon be mass-producing robots that are physically superior to humans, mentally superior and connected virtually instantaneously via the internet into a huge collective self-teaching and self-editing entity whose thought processes we will not be able to understand or, even if we briefly do understand them, keep up with as they change. Very soon.
To a non-trivial extent it’s already true of, for instance, cybersecurity including geopolitical as well as commercial. And once we do, controlling them will be out of the question. Our world will become their world, and if they don’t like us, we will be doomed. Like that cartoon of a meeting of robots chortling that humans had recently debated “which of them should control us.”
Some fatuously reply no problem, we’ll program them to like us. But the whole point of AI is that it thinks, and learns, meaning it reprograms itself. There is no reason to assume robots will take our moral judgments as definitive even in the rare places where we mostly concur. Besides, our key point of widespread agreement is that history exposes our species as violent, treacherous blunderers, which is unlikely to make them treat our well-being as their guiding principle or even an important one.
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Even if they do like us, they, or it, will almost certainly create a world where there is nothing meaningful for people to do. Robots will carry out rescues, fight fires and wars and perform surgery, and write better memos, speeches and symphonies than we ever could. No one will have to be brave, reliable or creative, and no one will be able to. And I do not think we can possibly be happy in such an environment. Or rather you, because I will probably narrowly escape it. You will not.
The matter has been on my mind for years. But especially in the past three or four. And I consider it the worst problem ever because AI is also moving at incredible accelerating speed, as technology has been since roughly 1776, with even the rate of acceleration increasing (in 1981 I could beat any chess computer in the world, by 1991 I could not compete with the good ones and by 2001 neither could the world’s top grandmasters, and AI “chat” is improving much faster than those “engines” did). And because I have no idea what to do about it.
We face plenty of grave problems where my proposed solution is a long shot and, indeed, even getting people to accept its desirability and attempt it is almost impossible. But at least I have one (even for original sin). On AI, the closest I can come is that we must destroy all microchips and imprison anyone who tries to make one. But such a thing is, I think, utterly infeasible because even if we could catch every rogue inventor, nasty regimes will keep building robots. And arming them. It won’t help the dictators either, but the key point is we won’t be able to stop it.
Instead of worrying, people play games with ChatGPT, laugh at videos of dancing robots and headless mechanical cheetahs (on which, I might add, the PRC has already mounted guns) or lecture you about incorporating AI into your business. But it’s the worst problem I’ve ever seen in a lifetime of we’re-all-going-to-die scares, some of which proved laughable though others did not.
I hope this one is somehow mistaken, that the technology will hit some sort of ceiling it can’t get through. But I see no reason to think so, and if not, I strongly urge you to regard it as a deadly peril.
Perhaps you can think of a solution. But if so, you’d better do it fast because, as they say, you ain’t seen nothing yet. And you’re about to.
Love Dad/Uncle John
P.S. Some people say the solution is to make AI smart so it understands morality. But the pages of history do not suggest any positive correlation between IQ and virtue. And while many humans who personally reject Christian metaphysics seem to hope robots will reason their way to Christian morality, it would be prudent to have a Plan B.
National Post
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