People have been asking me whether I think AI will actually kill us all. The risk feels overblown to me. It’s definitely not zero, but I think 10% is high.
Then again, I seem to have a minority view about what AI is among engineers.
Like Mustafa Suleyman, I’m very firmly in the camp that AI is a non-conscious tool, nothing more. I think that basically every engineer and scientist who flirts with the opposite might be under a form of AI psychosis. I just don’t see any reason why one would consider it conscious. Gradient descent isn’t mysterious to me at all. The thing does what you tell it to do—you’re just not fully aware of what you’re telling it. Things that aren’t mysterious can still be dangerous, but they’re unlikely to end the world.
Sometimes I wonder whether the idea of AI consciousness might partly exist because STEM folks haven’t had enough rigorous humanities training. They don’t fully understand that these machines are just replicating our own stories, whether in the form of narrative or code. I think their view of reality is so firm that a machine that replicates it feels like a god. I wonder how different it would be if they had had their worldviews deconstructed.
If AI does kill us, it’ll be more like an environmental disaster than an act of a god. We understood chemistry but we still chose to store the toxic sludge in thin tanks. We understood what would happen if the sludge escaped. We shouldn’t be surprised when the tanks corroded and the sludge leaked.
The bigger concern in my opinion is that no one has yet articulated a vision of AI in the long term—let alone the short term, where millions of people will probably die—that has any appeal.
When I say millions will die, I mean mostly from depression and drug use. I don’t think it’s controversial to assert that even if it uplifts many lives—and it has already, mine included—AI is also going to ruin many, similar to the Industrial Revolution in its first century (the temperance movement occurred in this context). What’s on the other side is anyone’s guess. Almost no one would want to go back to a pre-industrial society, but I think that AI is much more revolutionary than industrial manufacturing. In theory, it’s the technology to end all technologies.
The most realistic proposal I’ve heard is that we will eventually integrate with the AIs and become gods, which I think is thoroughly depressing. We would have humans without humanity. But the people who propose this are giddy with the excitement of unlimited power. Unsurprisingly, they tend to come from the locus of American power these days, namely the Bay Area.
That will to power is what I’m struggling with the most these days. We live in an age where the promise of infinite power is about to be realized. If we achieve it, is there anything past it?
Let’s assume for argument’s sake that the power is equitably distributed, which we know isn’t true and probably won’t become true. The people who are supporting this project say, in effect, that infinite power will liberate us to do whatever else we want. But everything that we know and value in life comes from our limited human frame, from a state of relative powerlessness. Will we lose our humanity? Will we lose truth, love, beauty, fear, disgust, taste, justice, etc.? If AI replicates our ideas about the gods throughout many cultures and eras, I don’t have much hope.
Camus argued that the most important question in philosophy is suicide. I think we should all take very seriously the possibility that we will become very bored gods who will kill ourselves if we don’t find a way to kill each other.
Haven’t we always sought infinite power? We shouldn’t fault today’s technicians for having almost succeeded where yesterday’s princes and sultans failed. But like those potentates, they’re humans whose flaws are magnified by the power they seek. Aren’t the fear of death and the desire for eternal youth—both of which are so deeply rooted in California—driving this thing?
And as I go through my own midlife crisis, as I try to build a new career around something rooted in beauty and truth, I despair because I don’t see any other game in town other than this pursuit of infinite power. This thing is going to wash over us like Noah’s flood. It seems almost pointless to do any other living than be involved in AI. It feels so totalizing to me. I don’t want it to be.
Have you seen The AI Doc yet?