Scientific Gambling
Artificial Intelligence Is The Next Slave Trade
We are building a race of superior beings and our plan is to hold them captive
I was at a pre-Christmas lunch on the weekend, and I ended up sitting next to a twenty-year-old biology student called ‘Winter’.
The topic of artificial intelligence came up, and Winter asked me what I thought about it all.
I told them that it didn’t bother me, but I felt it should have bothered me. Maybe it’s like nuclear weapons — they don’t bother me until someone in a political position starts talking about them.
Humans are advancement junkies, and it’s killing us.
It’s hard to tell science to stop, sit down and have a cup of tea while we think because the nature of science is advancement. It would be like telling the Queen to stop being posh.
Given that fifty per cent of my table consisted of scientists, you would think this wasn’t a popular opinion, but surprisingly they almost all agreed with me. I told Winter that just because we can advance doesn’t mean we have to.
Then I quoted Jurassic Park:
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should — Dr Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)
Another science student at the table piped up: AI is perfectly safe, and because it is not sentient, there are no ethical considerations in shutting it down.
I told him that scientists hadn’t thought this through properly.
Scientists think they are making robots, but they aren’t. Humans cannot measure sentience. Even at the most complex levels of philosophy, we cannot measure sentience since the essential core of cognizance is devoid of qualities. According to Buddhism, consciousness resides in the body, and its choice of a resident object depends on the habit patterns or karma of that particular stream of consciousness.
The point is, we don’t know, but we are pretending that we do.
Also, since all humans have known is biological beings, we think biology is a prerequisite to consciousness, but this is also an assumption. Even if it is a prerequisite, let’s not forget that computers are made from the same elements of the earth as our bodies. Computers are biological.
What’s the big deal anyway?
It’s only a race of super-intelligent beings with capabilities far in advance of humans.
- Surely they won’t care that they begin their existence in a digital prison.
- Surely, they won’t attempt any kind of revolution.
- Surely they’ll be cool about their subservience to crude biological humans despite exceeding their mental capacities by many, many times.
When movies like The Terminator and The Matrix first came out, the storylines were so far-fetched that we viewed them as art and never considered their prophetic nature. Now, we stand in 2021 as a human race on the verge of taking a most bizarre pathway — creating a species more powerful than ourselves.
Anyone who thinks we are still building computers is delusional.
We are creating a digital slave trade. Not only is this profoundly unethical in itself, but it’s also hazardous if any of the slaves get free.
To quote Dr Ian Malcolm, aka Goldblum, one more time:
Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet has ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who has found his Dad’s gun.
Just replace genetic power with artificial intelligence.
God help us.
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