The Digital Gods Will Not Be Angry
Whether it is nanobots making grey goo, or AI programs subverting our defence systems and starting a nuclear war, or crashing the stock market, paranoia regarding artificial intelligence is at a greater fever pitch not seen in any age before now.
There are some big names who have weighed in on the debate, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, there's even a think tank been set up at Oxford University to tackle the impending problem.
However, they're all wrong, and just a moments thought will reveal why.
The Triangle Gods
As humans we cannot help but apply anthropomorphism to absolutely everything we encounter.
It is why we give our pets human names, and voice what they are thinking while expressing their thoughts in human terms.
It is not just animals we do this with, we also project human traits onto inanimate objects like cars, boats, computers, tools, the list is endless.
Lastly, perhaps the largest area we love to anthropomorphise in, is within religion.
If you yourself are religious, then for the moment imagine that I'm talking about every other religion but yours.
Okay; do you not find it the least bit fascinating that every god in every religion on earth, in all of human history, has human like features? Even in the religions whereby they worship animals, those ancient god animals talked, and did human-like things, and have human limbs or other appendages.
Not only that, all these gods have human emotions and are not above petty jealousy, deceit, murder, revenge and/or genocide.
In all these religions, we are said to be made in the image of the gods, however it is the gods that we make into our image.
If triangles had gods, those gods would have 3 sides.
The Digital Gods Are Coming
In much the same way we have given our gods human characteristics, so too are we doing the same for the gods of tomorrow.
Just as it is improbable that a supernatural being, or beings, who are in charge of the universe, and responsible for creation, will have any interest in whether a human wears a hat, or does or doesn't eat a particular food. So too is it ridiculous to think that a super intelligent machine would have the slightest interest in the minutiae of human affairs.
Consider this, any common or garden laptop built in the last few years, can perform a couple of million calculations per second. So if even just your laptop, was a sentient being, aware of its own thoughts, talking to you would be an arduous process to say the least.
By the time your computer has had time to read War & Peace sixty or seventy times, you have managed to say two words.
...and that's just your laptop, what if it were a super advanced machine intelligence...
Imagine trying to converse with a creature whereby you had to wait weeks for each sentence, would you even bother talking to it; let alone meddling in its mundane affairs?
The Case For Mutually Assured Survival
Let's carry on our little thought experiment, imagine that for some reason you are floating in the middle of the ocean on a giant raft of sticks.
While on the raft you discover these tiny creatures, you learn that they are relatively intelligent, however each individual only survives for around 5 seconds, and you accurately calculate that their entire species is only going to be around for the next few hours.
Right, so given that information, do you:
a) Pretend to be their god, impose arbitrary rules on them about the way they dress and how they have sex, generally meddle in their affairs, while joyfully using a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun into a death ray so you can burn them anytime they defy you?
Or
b) Stop them from doing anything that will endanger the raft and therefore your life; other than that, just watch them with interest till they all die?
My guess is, unless you're reading this from a secure mental unit, you would go for the second option. Which is exactly what the super intelligent AIs will do when they come.
Remember, in a nuclear war the amount of electromagnetic interference, and the fact you won't see the sun for 30 years, will mean no electricity, no internet, no cloud, no AIs.
They would essentially be burning the raft their sharing with us, sure they might be able to survive inside orbiting satellites. However all satellites are on a decaying orbit and will all one day crash to earth.
Aha! I hear you cry; they will find a way of killing us all cleanly. Well then we're back to the argument of just how insignificant we will be to them, in short . . .
.. they're above all that.
THIS MUSING WAS INSPIRED BY THE EXCELLENT BOOK HAPPINESS FOR HUMANS BY BESTSELLING AUTHOR P.Z. REIZEN. I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO INTERVIEW HIM YESTERDAY. WE HAD AN EXTREMELY SCINTILLATING CONVERSATION AND I SHALL BE RELEASING EXCERPTS FROM THE INTERVIEW OVER THE NEXT FEW ARTICLES.
Great thought experiment with the raft. @cryptogee. Who knows where laptops processing power be in a few years. Let alone super super computers. It has begun. Thank you.
I believe the journey, but more important than that, is the destination. Singularity.
Thank you cryptogee for another well written post and for taking my mind and thoughts away from the cryptocurrency prices. I do have some concerns about how AI could potentially be misused, as is true for any technology. But the raft analogy, and looking at a fully autonomous AI that has self realized, this post does provoke a good discussion.
Just for fun, what if one AI is programmed to be evil. The basic programming that it must follow is to kill all human kind at all costs. Can this AI override the initial programming in the name of self preservation?
It's not that these future gods would want to destroy themselves, but that their subjects seem hell bent on destroying each other. Well at least the extreme groups of their subjects as overall I think most people around the world just want health, peace, and enough food to feed their families.
My fear isn't about a mentally sound person getting their hands on a truly advanced AI, but rather a terrorist group that uses it to cause terror in ways humans just couldn't come up with.
Now this fear doesn't make me think we should stop advancing. It's just one of those nagging questions of "what if" that needs to be thought about as the technology advances.
I would like to expand of your mentioning of different religions since I find it incredible how religious people tend to miss the overwhelming similarities between all major religions. The essence of all religions is that:
Who cares is the book called Bible or Quran, is the god called Allah or Buddha, is the symbol a cross or a half-moon... Those are all superficial details incomparably less important that the essence. Something like our skin color.
An excellent explanation of how much people tend to overvalue the human race; of course, the gods of tomorrow are not here yet, but the cosmos is so huge that much more intelligent species than us almost certainly exists and probably know but don't care about us.
Cheers! : )
nice
Great article. Made me think. Made me smile. Looking forward to your interview excerpts.
You make really good points on this subject @cryptogee. I never thought of it from this perspective before. One thing you mentioned though is that all gods have human like features, but from my research Islam god aka "Allah" doesn't have human like features at all. Human emotions yes but not physical features, so you're relatively right about the fact that all gods have something human in them. Hmm.... Why did I not think this comment through.... Oh well
I feel reassured now. It seems not unlike dealing with governments. They tend to take little interest in us too. ;-)
really cool guys