Who would disagree with Stephen Hawking, artificial intelligence is dangerous. I also think it can offer something to a chaotic species through dispassionate thought. AI has come a long way, it now performs surgery, drives cars, builds houses, grows food, but it will never enjoy escargot. Ultimately AI will provide us an opportunity for evolution, we will be able to focus on life itself and find new meaning as we integrate with technology and become cyborg. No longer hunter gatherers or wage earners when robots do everything for us, we might become explorers of life, philosophy, and space where robots can endure and human intelligence will become intergalactic.
Indeed AI has become the best tool in the box, even surpassing the hammer. Some say it’s the last tool we’ll ever need to invent. In truth it’s just that, another tool, and only becomes dangerous by its makers hand. It’s a reflection of human intelligence, it uses our processes and we programmed it. Indeed humans are dangerous so often at war. AI could take danger to a another level. Then again 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. Maybe we should differentiate between intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence is the process of association and like all processes can be implemented in computers. Consciousness is not a process but arises from the interplay of a singular intelligence and its unique disparate multisensory perception, all underpinned by memory and emotion. Let’s leave the process of human organisation to the glorified calculator, and consciousness to us.
In my research it’s been said not to think of AI as evil, it has no natural 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.