AI as evolution
AI is just part of evolution. Machines have been evolving for hundreds of years like animals. It would be no surprise if they developed all kinds of intelligence. Samuel Butler predicted this 152 years ago in the book Erehwon. This was the actual Butler that inspired the Butlerian Jihad in Dune, not Serena Butler. In Erehwon, there was a philosopher who wrote “The Book of the Machines”, this so convinced the inhabitants that they decided to destroy all machines above a level of complexity. From this, Frank Herbert developed humanity’s future in Dune.
There are plenty of science fiction stories of man warring against machines, they all begin from Samuel Butler’s book. AI may end up being the same choice, whether it is possible to build computers but not to the level of thinking machines. We have done quite well without them so far, it is only in the last few years with transformers that they have become more intelligent than humans.
We would have to forgo some possible benefits, like robot servants, AI finding new drugs, etc. But we have done quite well making drugs without it. My guess is this is the path we will end up following. AI may well be too big a threat we will end up destroying, or trying to destroy unsuccessfully soon. I don’t know if this is the right path or not, but I do think it will be tried quite soon.
Humans became supreme on Earth, often not by being superior, but by destroying their competitors. This is the nature of war, but also in nearly wiping out lions, tigers, wolves, sharks, etc. It’s hard to imagine their willingly becoming beholden to a much superior AI.
This is an excerpt from the book of the machines. Samuel Butler deserves a lot of credit for forseeing this 152 years ago. There was barely an understanding of electricity then. Nearly everything he said has come to pass. In fact his arguments are virtually identical to the pdoom people, except for the more antiquated language.
I originally read this around 1990, and have seen everything he said come true. There have been no other fiction writers I’m aware of seeing how things have actually happened. The only exception may be Rossum’s Universal Robots, in which the word robot was invented.
“There was a time, when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?
“Again. Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing — a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness) — why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different from all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?
“It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so.”
The writer, after enlarging on the above for several pages, proceeded to inquire whether traces of the approach of such a new phase of life could be perceived at present; whether we could see any tenements preparing which might in a remote futurity be adapted for it; whether, in fact, the primordial cell of such a kind of life could be now detected upon earth. In the course of his work he answered this question in the affirmative and pointed to the higher machines.
“There is no security” — to quote his own words — “against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now. A mollusc has not much consciousness. Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
“But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen’s egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg — cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg — cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for convenience’ sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the egg — shell is. A ‘machine’ is only a ‘device.’”
