Who would disagree with Stephen Hawking, Artificial Intelligence is dangerous. It has come a long way, now performing surgery, driving cars, building houses, growing food. Ultimately AI will provide humanity with an opportunity for evolution. We will be able to focus on life itself, and find new meaning. No longer hunter gatherers, or wage earners, robots will do everything for us. We might become explorers of life, philosophy, art, religion, and space where robots can endure forever. Human intelligence will become intergalactic.

Indeed AI is the best tool in the box, even surpassing the hammer. It’s the last tool we’ll ever need to invent. In truth it’s just that, another tool. It only becomes dangerous by its makers hand. AI is Human Intelligence, it uses our intellectual processes, we programmed it.

Humans are dangerous, so often at war. AI could take danger to a another level, but it might inherit human goodness, let’s hope it puts us to shame. A significant difference between Artificial and Human Intelligence is emotion, you can’t program it. AI does try to replicate emotion, but I suspect true emotion comes from the heart.

We should differentiate between Intelligence and Consciousness. Intelligence is a process, the association of objects, and like all processes it can be implemented in computers. Consciousness is not a process but perception. The unification of disparate human multisensory perception by an intelligence resulting in self awareness.

Let the glorified calculator perform the processes of material organisation. In my research it’s been said not to think of AI as evil, it has no emotion although it can perform evil acts. Evil certainly exists in human consciousness, maybe beyond. AI is an amplification of human intelligence rather than consciousness. Will it make our wrongs more pronounced or our goodness more profound? Will AI be benign, it is just a tool after all. It is us who can make it evil, we give it the potential. Left to its own devices it may not regard another aspect of human consciousness, compassion. Maybe we don’t understand existence well enough to manufacture intelligence. I don’t think we can manufacture consciousness. I think evil exists in consciousness rather than intelligence, it is not a process but an emotion. AI cannot be truly evil as it isn’t conscious. Rather it can replicate evil because of its programming, it has started to program itself. What happens to a tool out of control? The main point of this post is that artificial intelligence isn’t inherently dangerous, human consciousness is.

Consciousness is perception, experience, and localised memory, where identity emerges. Intelligence is the association of perception.