Navigating the Ethical Quandaries of Artificial Intelligence
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The Future of Life Institute has garnered thousands of high-profile signatures, including Elon Musk's, in support of a six-month precautionary pause on artificial-intelligence development. The concern is that AI labs are racing to create increasingly powerful systems that no one can predict or control. While control and regulation are central to the issue, it is not clear whose they will be. The historian Yuval Harari predicted that AI will result in a stronger class divide within human society, creating a world where those who ride the train of progress will have divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction. The fear reflected in the AI letter stems from the concern that even those who are on the "train of progress" will be unable to steer it. The end of capitalism is a serious threat to those in power, including those who develop, own, and control AI. The only choice left will be between a new form of communism and uncontrollable chaos. The new chatbots, as an example of AI, offer a structure of fetishist disavowal where people know they are not talking to real people but are still able to avoid accompanying risks.
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The AI letter is an attempt to prohibit the impossible, as it is impossible for humans to participate in a post-human future. Instead of focusing on threats to our freedom and dignity, we should consider what freedom means now. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that we will soon be dealing with "spiritual" machines that will surpass human intelligence. The "post-human" sciences are about surprise and emergent properties that AI models might acquire for themselves. Philosopher-engineer Jean-Pierre Dupuy observed that science and technology have undergone an inversion of traditional anthropocentric arrogance. The emerging technology today aims at non-mastery, and the engineer of tomorrow will not be a sorcerer’s apprentice because of his negligence or ignorance, but by choice. Some top scientists believe science has become so risky that it poses the principal threat to humanity's survival, contrary to Descartes's dream of becoming the master of nature. Philosophers who advocate for returning to the mastery of mastery have misunderstood the technology profiled at the horizon.
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Creating "post-humanity" threatens to strip humanity, nature, and divinity of their meaning and identity. A fully controlled existence lacks meaning and wonder, while divinity is only meaningful to humans as finite beings. Once we create properties that seem supernatural, gods as we know them will disappear, leaving us to question what, if anything, will be left. There is every reason to worry that tech-gnostic visions of a post-human world are ideological fantasies obfuscating the abyss that awaits us. Needless to say, it would take more than a six-month pause to ensure that humans do not become irrelevant, and their lives meaningless, in the not-too-distant future.
