Hippocratic Oath for Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence
In this year’s edition of ZOOM SMART CITIES (Portugal’s major Smart Cities event), we had the opportunity to listen to Arlindo Oliveira, the President of Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), talk about the future of humanity, and the challenges and questions continuously raised due to a growing euphoria concerning Artificial Intelligence. The prestigious scholar explains, in an absolutely extraordinary and coherent manner, how we are already living in the future.
It should not be the “bliss” and bewilderment felt with the new technological progress that should occupy our time and minds. The most complex and troubling part is that as we are attracted to fanciful discussions about what is intelligent or not, artificial or human, algorithms continue to run. Machines continue to multiply, relentlessly, their immediate capacity for self-learning and optimized systems, clashing head-on with our humanity, and promoting conflict between humans.
We have for long known that computing power is skyrocketing, and in many cases, overwhelmingly surpasses the human capacity to solve complex problems (it remains to be seen whether our innate ability to create them will also be supplanted). Machines that can study rules and guidelines become true gods in the Olympus of the Cloud. They become impossible to catch up to and exceed. The current technology enables them to run endless simulations and projections, learn from errors, and bypass them in the next instant, in a fraction of a second. At first glance, a simple game of Chess or Go, or Rubik’s Cube, for example, appears to be naïf and harmless. After all, we already know our natural limitations, and acknowledge machines as being infinitely better at processing information and data. However, the most important game machines play a key role in is directly related to our lives.
The greatest technological advancement in modern history was the invention of the ‘Press’ in the fifteenth century. It allowed for one to seek empirical knowledge to supplant the previously dominant liturgical doctrine. The Age of Reason gradually replaced the Age of Religion. It was a decisive moment for individual development and scientific knowledge as a substitute for faith as the prime reason for the formation of human knowledge. The information then began to be recorded and organized in archives and libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thought and action that shaped the present world in which we live.
This order is now also in the process of being gradually replaced by a new one. An order founded also on a technological revolution, but more complex, and whose consequences none have managed to identify and evaluate so far, and which could ultimately leave the world dependent on data-fed machines and ungoverned algorithms devoid of ethical, moral, or philosophical principles.
This is the time for humanity to support the fight enlightenment inspired: the fight to promote philosophical thinking through technology
The ‘Internet’ age we live in today creates one of the issues to make artificial intelligence even more pressing. The Enlightenment [Age of Reason] movement tried to submit the traditional truths to an analytical and free human reasoning. The use of the Internet now serves to confirm knowledge through the gathering and manipulation of continuously expanding data. Human ‘knowledge’ loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become the order of the day.
Internet users rarely wonder about history or philosophy. They mostly require information of relevance to their immediate needs. In the process, search engines algorithms gain the ability to predict individual preferences, allowing other algorithms to customize information to be used later on for political and commercial purposes. Social networks, for example, become places of dispute and conflict, provoking anger and frustration. The speed and promptness by which information is presented inhibit reflection. They encourage radical rather than intelligent thinking. They value consensus by subgroups rather than by introspection.
In a previous article, I mentioned the possibility of future Quantum Mayors or, in short, of mayors becoming extinct due to their clear incompetence. It is a job many now wish it would be performed with precision, based on data and artificial intelligence, so as to maximize and raise the efficiency of processes, particularly in cities. What we refer to as a “support tool” to humanity can be [seen as] a threat. On the one hand, there is the human being who becomes “brutish” and as a direct result degenerates into darkness; on the other hand, there is the machine, in an uncontrolled self-learning process, fed by algorithms and information coming from the social networks and other platforms. That machine is able to promote the extinction of the individual conscious mind, the consequences of which we can already see a glimpse every day in politics, business, divisive causes, friendships, and even relationships.
These pressures weaken the pillars needed to develop and build beliefs, which emerge only to thread a lonely road–present in the essence of creativity.
This is the ideal time to launch a “Hippocratic Oath” for the technology industry. It is the time to define the rules of conduct, making it impossible to grow algorithms allegedly ‘neutral’ and devoid of ‘emotions’ and ‘values’.
Human intelligence is still dominant in this day and age. While the world races to master artificial intelligence, and while there is an urgent need to secure access to data, whether it be for security reasons (facial recognition), sharing of personal information to obtain several benefits (social score), this is the time for humanity to support the fight enlightenment inspired: the fight to promote philosophical thinking through technology. That is because we also dwell in an age that follows in the opposite direction: we create potentially dominant technology in our quest for a philosophical system to guide us. We can still win the race; a race soon to become unwinnable.
PS: The article of this edition did not make use of any AI mechanisms to discover the current topic.
