Anthropomorphizing AI

I’ve been reading up on AI ethics and design and thinking about what people write about the intelligence explosion and ASI. I love to see other people’s point of view on subjects I am interested in because it makes you think, gives you another perspective and challenges you beliefs. It feels good to my brainzz.

And I started wondering…

It is common in the AI community and especially the proponents of the view that ASI will be man’s last invention in a doomsday kind of fashion, that we should not anthropomorphize AI and subscribe human characteristics to it because it will be a completely alien entity with no connection to human life whatsoever.

This seems strange to me because even if AI is created or creates itself entirely as a self contained entity, will it not use human data to educate itself about the world it inhabits? If not for eternity then at least in its “Childhood”. Which would mean it is “raised” and “educated” by humans. That should rub off should it not?

Now I’m no scientist so I don’t know how this would turn out in the long run. (And I am pretty sure scientists themselves don’t know either, at least not completely) But it will probably have at least some impact on how the AI views the world, how it views humans and how it develops its first ideas when it reaches consciousness.

I’m not sure if this is positive, negative or makes no difference while the AI decides to destroy humankind for the benefit of efficiency and reaching it’s goals. But I think this does mean we can anthoropomorphize the AI. It is a mirror to our data and therefore a mirror of us.

If the AI decides to destroy the world as we know it I think it is just acting like a human. We have, for a good portion of our history, destroyed worlds and not given a second thought to the lives lost when we, for instance, destroy an anthill, remove cockraoches from our house, breed animals untill they can no longer survive on their own in the wild or wipe out coral reefs by warming up the earth.

Maybe ASI will turn us into cattle. or keep us as pets, or wipe us out as pests. In all cases I think it should be fine to anthropomophize it, it is just doing what we taught it to do.