I’ve been saying this for a while: more than global warming (which is huge and affects more than us), more than antibiotic resistance as a result of indiscriminate use (which may yet reduce us to medieval medicine and should do rather a lot to enhance the status of homoeopathy, herbalism and acupuncture), more than the rise of the lunatic right and the hegemony of the mega-corporations… the proximity to the singularity, when we design and build the silicon mind that can design and build its own successor… is going to change the face of humanity for ever. And now someone else is saying it..
Stephen Hawking and colleagues have written a piece in today’s Independent. It’s locked on the same page as a fashion article (that I didn’t read, so can’t tell you what it was about) which tells you all you need to now about how seriously our media outlets are taking this - which is to say not at all - but at least they did print it.
The key paragraph is this:
So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, “We’ll arrive in a few decades,” would we just reply, “OK, call us when you get here – we’ll leave the lights on”? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.
It’s not electorally useful, it doesn’t play to the dog whistles or to the religious nuts, it probably doesn’t feature in the upcoming Labour policy review. But it should, if only as a discussion point. I’m not sure what we can do - possibly nothing… but at least we ought to have some idea of what’s happening.
Full story in the Independent, here.
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The silicone mind will, of course, be effectively immortal. It will have no need of and ultimately no conception of, the hopes, loves and fears of humanity. Conversely it will have no need for, and probably no conception of the hatreds, insecurities and other destructive emotions we have.
It will have no desire to express its emotions through creative things, because it won’t have those emotions.
And it will have no need for humanity. We will be irrelevant to it. And does any intellect operating purely by logic, preserve that which is unnecessary to it?