Artificial Intelligence Will Soon Shape Themselves, and Us
A.I.s will evolve to use techniques that no one — not even they — understand
A future where we’re all replaced by artificial intelligence may be further off than experts currently predict, but the readiness with which we accept the notion of our own obsolescence says a lot about how much we value ourselves. The long-term danger is not that we will lose our jobs to robots. We can contend with joblessness if it happens. The real threat is that we’ll lose our humanity to the value system we embed in our robots, and that they in turn impose on us.
Computer scientists once dreamed of enhancing the human mind through technology, a field of research known as intelligence augmentation. But this pursuit has been largely surrendered to the goal of creating artificial intelligence — machines that can think for themselves. All we’re really training them to do is manipulate our behavior and engineer our compliance. Figure has again become ground.
We shape our technologies at the moment of conception, but from that point forward they shape us. We humans designed the telephone, but from then on the telephone influenced how we communicated, conducted business, and conceived of the world. We also invented the automobile, but then rebuilt our cities around…
