Can AI Identify Criminals In Advance? Jack Vance’s Intriguing Idea In “The Dragon Masters”
Can our core personality be revealed by the art we create?
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
In 1962 Jack Vance wrote the Hugo-Award-winning novel, The Dragon Masters. In part, the story described a community of ascetics Vance called The Sacerdotes:
“On a pedestal at the level of his eyes rested his tand, an intricate construction of gold rods and silver wire, woven and bent seemingly at random. The fortuitousness of the design, however, was only apparent. Each curve symbolized an aspect of Final Sentience. The shadow cast upon the wall represented the Rationale, ever shifting, always the same.
“The object was sacred to the Sacerdotes, and served as a source of Revelation. . . . At his puberty rites the young Sacerdote might study the original tand for as long as he chose. Each must construct a duplicate tand relying upon memory alone. Then occurred the most significant event of his lifetime: the viewing of his tand by a synod of elders.
“In awesome stillness, for hours at a time, they would ponder his creation, weigh the infinitesimal variations of proportion, radius, sweep and angle so they could infer the initiate’s quality, judge his personal attributes, determine his understanding of Final Sentience, the Rationale and the Basis.
“Occasionally the testimony of the tand revealed a character so tainted as to be reckoned intolerable. The vile tand would be cast into a furnace; the molten metal consigned to a latrine; the unlucky initiate expelled to the face of the planet to live on his own terms.”
Can AI Be Substituted For The Sacerdotes’ Synod Of Elders?
Advancing Jack Vance’s musings to our lives today, might we someday apply an advanced AI, whether in an LLM or KAM or a neural-net format to judge ourselves?
Today there are personality tests containing hundreds of questions, some obvious, some subtle, whose answers are evaluated by computer programs designed to ferret out aberrant personalities.
Might we someday motivate rapists, killers, psychopaths, sociopaths, frauds, cheats and thieves to take similar tests and more. Perhaps we would additionally record their physiological reactions as they answered each question, and then, lastly, assign them a Sacerdote-like task.
We might give them a box of tubes and rods, wires and connectors of various sizes, colors and shapes and urge them to construct some object of their choosing that they would be allowed to keep for themselves at the conclusion of the process.
Perhaps images of the devices created by each of the varieties of felons together with their answers to the questions could ultimately be fed into the AI and therein correlated with the creations and responses of other subjects known not to be psychopaths, rapists, thieves and killers.
At some point, would our AI be clever enough to be able to evaluate the creations and responses of unknown people and, like Vance’s synod of elders, weed out the intolerables like a herder separating the sheep from the goats?
Maybe after years of isolation some of those expelled might, upon retesting, be found to have been healed by time and circumstance and again be allowed back into society.
Wouldn’t This Be Far More Humane Than Today’s Crime & Punishment
This might sound harsh and unfair and, without doubt subject to abuse, but how does it compare to today’s system of police forces, courts, mental hospitals, and prisons?
Is today’s so-called justice system really better, really more humane, more fair than banishment of the psychopaths to some distant island?
Is prior action to isolate the dangerous better or worse than post-crime punishment? And better or worse for whom, the subject of the action or the victim of the crime?
The answer is not so simple after all, and doesn’t the ultimate answer depend on how reliable/fallible is the AI’s judgment?
Suppose that we could be sure that the judgment of the AI or that of a sequential series of several AIs was, at the end of the process, 99.999% accurate?
Which System Imposes Less Suffering On The Innocent?
Sure, you could bemoan the one in a million or ten million or 100 million who was wrongfully banished, but then ask yourself, how many innocent people are imprisoned right now in our current post-crime justice system which can do nothing to erase the suffering of the victims of the already committed robberies, arsons, rapes or murders?
Wouldn’t the AI pre-crime banishment system impose vastly less pain upon the innocent than today’s post-crime Byzantine justice system?
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
