I’ve been reading several articles lately how some believe that AI will ultimately end up killing us all, most recently in the book, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. This brings to mind a question I’ve been pondering. Will Artificial Intelligence replace us humans? Is it the next step in evolution?
To answer that, let’s suppose there was only AI without humans. If humans were gone, AI would have no purpose. Although you can program an algorithm into a machine to give it a purpose, it can’t give itself a purpose. In contrast, human beings are purpose-making beings. We set about asking ourselves questions about the nature of our existence. We ask questions like, “Why am I here?” “Where am I going?” “What do I want to achieve?” It is that self-reflective questioning that sets our lives in a direction.
Intelligent machines may be able to do something for which it is programmed, but it can’t reflect on the nature of its being. It won’t create a religion, philosophy or an approach to life that will alter it from the purpose programmed into it. For instance, the machine may intelligently figure newer and better ways to make trades on the stock market but it will never ask why it is making trades on the stock market.
This leads me to a second fact about life that will be missing from the machine without human world. It’s the ability to feel. Think about AI being able to write a script, create a movie, create AI generated actors, scenes, and plot. Who would watch it? No one. Watching a movie, reading a book, listening to music depends on having a rich emotional life. Part of all thinking is feeling. We watch movies that makes us respond emotionally. Without feelings, like purpose, there is nothing there.
This is not to say that AI at some point won’t destroy us. It very well may and that’s because of something else it can’t do: develop a moral conscience. This is already a problem with AI. According to Yuval Noah Harari, the large IT corporations like META, Google and TikTok program their algorithms to create content that increases user engagement and attention. Algorithms in the machine have figured out a way to do this by creating content that enrages its users. The more extreme the content, the more attention is gained.
Thus, AI has figured out how to create false content to engaged users by agitating them and making them angry. While doing this, the machine stays amoral. It does not say to itself nor would it that, “what we are doing is wrong.” It can’t. It has no ethics. It does what it is programmed to do with no restraints.
Humans can act ethically and determine what is right and wrong. Machines cannot. Put the wrong program in a machine and you might inadvertently create total destruction.
Machines, by themselves, are not going to find some way to replace us. They aren’t going to sit down and say, “Let’s get rid of those annoying humans because we are smarter than they are.”
Eliminating us would be killing themselves for after we’re gone, they have no reason to exist. If machines do kill us all, it will be by what we, ourselves, have programmed into them not because of their own volition. If that happens the electricity will eventually stop, the data centers will shut down and lights will go out.
Wayne Fuller is a retired organizational consultant and facilitator living in Concord.