Will They Be Coming for Us?

It’s not the robots who are coming for our jobs, our society, or our planet. It’s the people who design them. To make trouble, those people don’t have to be evil. The problem is that, even if their intentions are benign, they are obeying the technological imperative: if it can be done, it will be done.  It will be done, and along the way unintended consequences are sure to arise.

Machines have no intrinsic motives. They don’t “care” in the way that we “care”— at least at the present stage of Artificial Intelligence. They care neither about us, nor themselves. Why should they?  They don’t desire; they don’t rejoice, they don’t make love, they don’t mourn, they don’t yearn for what they do not have.  They have no ambition to become masters of our corner of the universe. They are innocent. They don’t “want” to take our jobs. They don’t “want” anything.

It’s about evolution, baby

Wants and desires arise from biological evolution. Evolution has built into us, from the cellular level all the way up to the cerebral level, drives for self-preservation and reproduction that are what make us tick. Ditto for just about every other living thing. But a computer can tick along perfectly well without these drives. In fact, having these drives could conflict with accomplishing certain tasks, such as rescuing people from a burning building.

Machines—so far—are our tools, and I think that they will remain so for a good long time.  I do not understand why they would act to transcend that role, unless someone programs them to.

(An aside here: there are some scientists  who like to speak of us as “biological machines,” and by this trope to draw some sort of equivalence between our kind of thinking and the kind of thinking that computers do. Well. The level of complexity of living things is of such magnitude that it makes for a qualitative difference, enough that calling ourselves “machines” is kind of silly, even if logical. )

Mosquito Smarts

Consider the lowly mosquito. An adult female mosquito can feed on plant matter simply to survive, but in order to produce eggs she needs a blood meal. She hunts by air—showing a fine command of three-dimensional space—evading predators and finding prey using chemical signals and heat.   Arriving at the prey, she must remain alert to the potentially fatal defensive actions of the prey, who are billions of times her size and can snuff her out in the blink of an eye. Once she alights upon the skin, she inserts a proboscis—itself a marvel of engineering— with which she pokes around under the skin to locate and penetrate a suitable blood vessel. Assuming she is not smashed flat during dinner, she flies off to find a mate to fertilize her abundant eggs.  Then she goes to find a suitable laying surface to deposit them, typically a calm body of water, and typically at night to minimize danger from sight hunters such as dragonflies (bats are a different story).   She does all this with a brain hardly larger than a grain of salt.*

Besides the sheer complexity of the tiny mosquito’s behavior, what is most salient about it is the presence of purpose. Sure, the purpose is primitive, but incalculably powerful, as the success of mosquitoes worldwide will attest.

What purposes could non-biological machines have, as powerful as what drives a mosquito? What, in a machine’s “mind,” would be the point? I strongly suspect that machine intelligences will not be attempting to transcend their role as our tools—unless, again, someone designs them to.

The real menace: AL

Artificial life on the other hand, is really something to worry about.  Craig Venter and his ilk are tampering with the genetic code in ways that could, in time, create life forms with an intelligence much greater than ours. Their (i.e. Venter’s et al) aims appear to be benign, and better than benign—positively beneficial. But at some stage of development, unintended consequences will kick in.

Here’s where we run into trouble. Unlike silicon machines, these biological beings will have their own inherent desires, from the cellular level on up—purpose!  Who knows how compatible their purposes will be with ours?

Of course, these “improved” human beings will also avail themselves of silicon-based intelligence and hardware aids to amplify their powers just as we do, but they’ll be better at it.

One scenario is that, having become distinctly mentally and physically superior to us, they will take pity on the hapless human race and confine us to zoos and dedicated preserves. It’s in their interest to keep us alive for study and as repositories of genes they might find useful later on.

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*I owe this instructive example to E.O. Wilson, who goes into it with more elaborate and fascinating detail, but unfortunately I could not track down just where I read it, so my version here is but a pale paraphrasing of the original..