AI R US
Text accompaniment to the images AI R US I and II
If you caught me early, this page is still in progress; edits might be on their way.
We are not humans dependent on AI; we are AI. What is “AI” as we know it or would create it — past, present or future — but an extension of what it is to be human? The most artificial intelligence on this planet is not any one entity but immense collections of humans — and recently, computers — interacting together, forming chaos, collective intelligence, and emergent phenomena.
I am not so much more worried about the colossal existential threat already posed by humans (to each other and to other species), just because AI is involved. I view all possible futures as occurring on a multidimensional spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Many of us focus on the disasters that AI might engender, but AI could also be our ally, our symbiote, our salvation.
For those few of us who like long versions, I expand on these ideas below:
We are not humans dependent on AI;[1] we are AI.[2] Why draw lines in the sand, between a human enhanced beyond their ancestors by language, by writing, by an abacus, by a computer…to programs written by humans executing on machines built by humans…to humans enhanced with software and hardware…to machines building machines and being built by machines that somewhere down the line were conceived by humans? Some tools, whether writing or the ability for each individual to “instantaneously consult with the sum total of accumulated human knowledge”[3], are so ground-breaking that no matter how nostalgic humans of a “now” may be for their now when it becomes the future’s past, one is fundamentally handicapped when eschewing the tool, and humanity cannot be expected to go backwards and abandon the tool.[4]
Humans, with their cognitive developments and their increasingly complex tools, were long the most artificial intelligence around, among individual entities.[5] But the most artificial intelligence on this planet is formed by humans, computers and knowledge interacting together, forming unimaginably complex dynamic systems.[6] Collective intelligence, emergent phenomena, where the teeming tiny elements are not birds or bugs but billions of intelligent, powerful humans and computers, interconnected. As far as potentially malevolent AI’s to worry about, visions of androids gone mad haunt me far less than the form that is already thriving since centuries: corporations. And governments, for that matter, since far longer.
AI might save us. Perhaps, e.g., our descendants are only able to survive a post-human-caused-disaster world by becoming partially virtual, partially artificial, and therefore able to continue existing and experiencing. Or perhaps our descendants do this before disaster strikes, and thrive rather than merely surviving; leading fulfilling, interesting, mainly-virtual sustainable existences, they spend time in the “real world” only with respect and compassion for each other and nature.[7] Perhaps we/AI save ourselves from disaster(s) by better resource distribution calculations, by discovering efficient circular economies, by having dangerous or tedious work done by robot labor.
We are the past (and present) of AI,[8] like amoebae and chimpanzees are our past.[9] We identify in the human present/past with a very thin slice of real time[10] even if it seems a very huge slice of time on the human scale. In the future what “we” means will continue to change, and AI will almost certainly be a major component. In my personal fantasy future, “we” — i.e., some sort of descendant of ours, via genetics and/or via our thought and handiwork — live fulfilling, comfortable but thoughtful lives, where “we” never stop growing in wisdom and intelligence, and in compassion and respect to each other, other species, and our environment.
Notes:
[1] And I’m dubious of the pejorative connotations that some like to give this idea, i.e., that we are inferior to our predecessors, because they could do this or that [a] better than we can, deprived of our “extensions.”
[a] E.g., navigate by the seat of their pants, or do arithmetic in their heads. Or, before the invention of writing, remember and transmit to the next generation relatively vast amounts of information.
[2] supposed to say as mathematical equation, we \equiv AI, but having symbol issues.
[3] Coupland, Douglas, in Future Blips, essay in Bit Rot, 2016.
[4] But hopefully, can be expected to try to use tools more wisely; to continue to gain in compassion, fairness, respect for others, including other species.
[5] Look at aerial views of our civilization, and how they resemble our circuit boards…
[6] Not just chaos, but second order chaos: chaos that is even harder to predict than first order chaos (e.g., the weather) because it responds to prediction (e.g. politics).
See Harari, Yuval N., Sapiens : a Brief History of Humankind, 2015. Or this
online summary of the concept.
[7] Only humans, among all organisms/entities we know of, make pollution, garbage, destruction and misery on such scales, with such abandon and glee.
[8] As far as we know; I am not speaking of AI originating from civilizations in distant galaxies.
[9] Or appropriate last common ancestors, if you wish, but those are fairly similar to modern day amoebae and chimpanzees.
[10] I.e., the geological scale.
