Artificial Intelligence

A few years ago Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk had a well-publicized disagreement over the potentially destructive consequences of future generations of artificial intelligence (AI). Mr. Zuckerberg felt AI would in large be a net positive to society and any doomsday scenarios were alarmist. Mr. Musk believed the doomsday scenarios should not be discounted and stated “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.“

Others point out that even before we get that far the replacement of human workers by super-intelligent robots in professions as diverse as telemarketers to medical doctors, will leave many people unemployed and strain, possibly break, society’s social safety nets.

What both of these doomsday scenarios fail to account for is the perseverance of humankind. Faith in humanity to persevere. Whether it is engineering the necessary safeguards to ensure super-intelligence does not morph into super-destructiveness or modifying our social contracts to account for possibly prolonged periods of joblessness due to technological disruption, the doomsday scenarios are overly pessimistic but still highlight hurdles that require our attention.

Technology replacing human workers is not new and some of our existing social safety nets were designed during past periods of elevated joblessness. This has been happening since the earlier Industrial Revolutions. But if the past is any indication of the future employment rebounds after a sufficient period of workforce retraining and new industries providing new sources of employment come online. Have faith that we can do the same again if it proves necessary. Have faith in human ingenuity, and compassion to persevere.

As for prognosticators predicting the end of civilization at the hands of an all powerful AI. Well I wouldn’t bet against humanity just yet. AI is still in its infancy. The rigorous engineering and error tolerances that have been pioneered in other engineering disciplines have not been applied to AI yet. In some AI applications today success rates of 90% are considered acceptable. Think automatic photo tagging of friends and family on Facebook. Compare that to the current state-of-the art for some highly available systems that require reliability tolerances of 99.999% or even higher. And if things do fail regardless of that reliability? Then good engineering isolates and minimizes the damage. Backup systems take over. Yes there may be an outage but it is isolated, short-lived, and not catastrophic.

Am I worried about an artificial super-intelligence destroying human civilization? No because I have faith in the compassion of humanity, its scientists and engineers, and its regulators and legislators. That does not mean our safety will come for free. It will require sound engineering discipline, diligence, and regulations enforced at many steps along the way. Great minds must be brought to bear to solve the real problems associated with the technology. But despite these hurdles I believe AI must be developed. Its power and potential for good are just too significant to ignore.

What is that potential? I believe humanity’s efforts to develop AI will begin a long march towards a new form of life. But this time the march will not be guided by The Invisible Hand of the Divine over a span of billions of years and across the vast expanses of our Universe. It will instead be guided by humanity over much smaller time scales and with much more focused objectives.

There will be many advances required along the way. Our understanding of sentience for example needs more development. By sentience, I mean the ability to feel and experience sensations. It is a critical milestone as many ethicists consider it a necessary and sufficient condition for having moral standing. In other words, an entity’s ability to feel pleasure and pain is often considered a fundamental basis for why we have moral obligations towards it. The vast majority of animals on our planet are considered sentient, and there is growing research that many invertebrates such as insects, lobsters, and octopuses are as well.

But sentience is just an early stage of consciousness. Aside from the sensations that come with sentience, consciousness entails further awareness of our thoughts, emotions, and environments. In it’s most advanced incarnations consciousness involves self-awareness whereby an individual is aware of their own well-being, existence, identity, and place in the world.

How phenomena such as consciousness and self-awareness emerge from our immaterial mind remains deeply mysterious. Entirely new branches of science and discovery may need to be developed in order to unlock these mysteries. And even once such complexity is understood enough for us to create an instance of self-awareness many more advances will be required on our journey to create life. For example, the instilment of advanced emotions such as empathy must be addressed. Then with those in place we can begin to discuss selflessness, and self-sacrifice: putting the needs of others ahead of oneself. What then follows will be the hallmarks of something much greater: artificial love.

And with that breakthrough comes the task of guiding that entity towards a higher purpose.

Humanity must be it’s guiding star.

And when that day comes I believe we will have a more compassionate history on our side. We will be able to point to our past and say “learn from us“. And that command will not elicit fear or concern within us about what our creations may discover. Because by the time that our creation is asking for a higher purpose I believe our civilization’s advances will reveal the progression of our compassion that points to that purpose. A history that will clearly show that we no longer worship wealth, or power, or status.

But love.

Love in the form of social justice, care, forgiveness, and humility.

Yes when our creation is asking for a higher purpose we must be able to point to ourselves and command with confidence “learn from us”. We must be willing to share all of our mistakes, our flaws, our triumphs and tragedies. Our complete history that will reveal over time that we have elevated our love to new heights.

And at a time where entire sectors of our economy are being redefined by the early forms of AI it is important to note just how far we are from such a milestone. I believe our history will advance to embrace love more fully before we ever have to imprint a higher purpose on any self-aware creation. A moment that lies beyond the second vision.

And then we must grapple with the question of whether what we have created is in fact life. In an earlier post I said I believed that for human beings, love, life, and a soul come into existence at the same instant in time, in utero. That this trinity is enforced by The Greatest Love. But what about an artificially created, self-aware being, that can love? Does it represent life? Today we cannot come to a consensus on what constitutes life so to even ask the question makes little sense today. But I believe that day will come.

And when we largely agree that humanity has created a form of conscious life that is capable of love we will ask an even more fundamental question: Does it have the right to a soul and should we as its creators provide it with one? Not a supernatural soul as imparted by The Greatest Love that transcends the laws of nature and unlocks the heavens for us, but an artificial soul representing a covenant between humankind and its creation. A covenant promising renewed life for the love contained within the lifeform after the original body becomes obsolete or rendered inoperable beyond repair. Can we allow loving life, which we created, to die into nothingness? Or will the love for our creations mandate that we provide more to them upon their initial cessation as, I believe, our Creator has provided us?

There are so many more questions to this train of thought but, perhaps fortunately, I believe they need not be answered anytime soon. Until this far distant future comes to pass I believe we have currently progressed our love enough to begin this journey and I do not fear the march of the robots. In fact I believe it is a necessary march. A march that will force our civilization to gaze into our own souls and assess what is required to be self-aware, to live, and to love. For it is in such a pursuit that we will grow and learn and become a better people.