Imagine standing in front of a mirror looking at your reflection.
Mirrors have existed for thousands of years, originally naturally in the form of pools
of calm water reflecting an image and then obsidian glass, and eventually polished copper
and bronze.
Today, mirrors are everywhere and most humans use them, indeed often one of the first things
humans see after waking up is their reflection after a good, or not so good sleep.
Modern mirrors have come so far that we use very special ones to make astronomical telescopes
like the James Webb.
But, as precise as it is, it’s still a mirror.
When we look at ourselves in a mirror however it comes with the expectation of it being,
well, a mirror image.
A perfectly accurate reflection of ourselves.
Even some of the animals understand this, that the reflection they see is of themselves,
and not another animal, though that happens too.
But if that reflection suddenly became somehow off, weird in some way, and was not reflecting
you as you believe yourself to be, it becomes nightmare fuel one expects to see only in
the context of a horror movie.
There a mirror is transformed into a window into seeing something else.
A distortion of what it’s supposed to be.
That of course is fiction, but we stand, right now, at the precipice of incorporating another
kind of mirror into our lives.
A potentially much more capable one in the form of artificial intelligence.
Useful artificial intelligence and machine learning has been around for a good long while
now, and has shown itself to have many uses.
But so far, it’s been very specialized.
You write a program that can improve itself to look through scientific data and pick out
the interesting bits and pieces and discard the mundane or the errors.
This is of great importance today where data sets can be unbelievably enormous.
This is especially important in astronomy where data sets can be so huge that it would
take forever for a human to look through them, but a computer can do it in short order.
Take SETI, where a radio telescope receiver can search millions of channels simultaneously
for interesting radio signals but pick up thousands or more signals from satellites,planes,
etc. that aren’t of interest and can filter them out due to the known characteristics
they have.
Granted, this also opens the whole thing up to missing something important, a subject
of debate in SETI of late, but the really interesting candidate signals will still make
it through the process.
But back to the mirror.
When one plays with the modern crop of chatbots, such as the ChatGPT, we start to see a kind
of uncanny valley surfacing.
The uncanny valley proper refers to robotics, where humans are generally comfortable seeing
something that looks like a robot.
A Mars rover isn’t particularly scary, and there are plenty of examples of nice robots
that we like so long as they clearly are machines.
There are some that might be avoided, Johnny Five dancing around flailing with electrical
arcs going off everywhere might warrant some safety distance, but fundamentally if it looks
like a robot we can handle it.
But the more human a robot looks, the more uneasy most of us get.
And it’s because it’s too close and we know better.
We know it’s not a human.
Perhaps this idea is most famous with the Terminator.
It not only looked human when it was in good shape, it also looked like a robotic skeleton
when it wasn’t.
In short, it was double spooky.
But it was not a human.
Where the uncanny valley begins to fall apart however, maybe, is when something becomes
so human that we either can’t tell the difference or we stop caring.
This is where artificial intelligence gets rather sad in science fiction, and it’s
been that way since the start.
In 1938 Lester Del Rey published the short story Helen O’Loy, still a very relevant
and very sad story of AI Robotics.
Fast forward to Stephen Spielberg’s film AI.
Again, not the happiest of films.
It’s because there can be a certain tragedy of emulating the human, but it never really
being human.
We now seem set to begin the exploration of the uncanny valley with our current developments
in AI.
How far the process has gotten has all too often been downplayed.
A decade ago, some futurists were pointing out that our computers were merely glorified
calculators that did not possess the basic intelligence of a cockroach, and it would
be a long time before they ever would, if ever.
We simply blew past that, our computers of today with machine learning, specialized AI,
and so on can not only outdo a cockroach, it’s on the level with some macrofauna if
you go by certain metrics.
With the Chat GPT craze, we can clearly see that our development of chatbots has really
begun to blur some lines, ostensibly hammering home that not only have we surpassed the Turing
test, we’ve gone into new territory entirely.
And here’s the real risk of artificial intelligence.
It’s not the equipment or the programming, you’ll hear programmers point out that these
are programs only carrying out instructions and do not pose a threat, nor are they all
that advanced.
They are not sapient.
Fair enough, but my counter to this, and where my concerns lie, is that while we may not
be underestimating the computers, rather we may be overestimating the human.
We don’t really know what makes us, us.
At its most simple, some have made the case that a human is simply the sum of their experiences.
If that’s the case, a big if really, then we are replicable by a computer and we may
not realize we’ve done it until after we do.
But if we bear some intangible attributes that may not translate to silicon, then we
have a clear divide that may never be surmounted.
But until we understand ourselves, it’s hard to weld our human templates onto computers.
While right now we deal with interesting chatbots that you can get to say scary things sometimes,
which is outweighed by their ability to write poetry, scripts, do research etc.
They have very rapidly integrated themselves into a great many people’s lives.
This trend is not going to stop.
But I present to you an even scarier question.
Can the forces in nature that led to the human, in turn be applicable and advantageous for
Artificial Intelligence.
And is this the rule for how civilizations play out in the universe?
We are natural.
Natural selection and subsequent evolution seems to have produced our intelligence, along
with that of our hominid precursor relatives.
Intelligence appears in the animal kingdom, though perhaps of a different flavor than
our own.
Our planet’s history, overall, represents an overall trend towards at least rudimentary
intelligence, and a capability of producing our civilization.
Yet, what did we do with that?
Well, we’re currently striving to headlong jump into the development of advanced artificial
intelligence.
Is the transition from carbon intelligence to silicon a step in evolution?
Once that leap is made, can technology itself become subject to natural selection and evolution?
Welcome to the “undiscovered country” of Hamlet folks, and for that matter Star
Trek.
Today we aim to create AI that goes beyond, perhaps far and beyond, our own intelligence
without really wondering beforehand what that’s going to look like.
Look at ChatGPT, on the one hand you’ll hear people downplay it.
It’s just a program, it’s stupid, we understand it, we aren’t worried about it.
Sure, some students might have it write their essays for them and try to cheat.
No big deal right.
Well, on the other hand University of Maryland researchers have determined that AI generated
text is actually mathematically impossible to detect at some level.
The better the chatbot gets at writing, the less chance there is it will be recognized
as such.
In other words, wait three years and we’ll have to institute supervisory rules on students
writing papers, the seeds of which are already being planted.
And it’s because writing isn’t that hard once you get some of the ground rules covered.
We have overestimated, at this point in time, just what good writing is and why some humans
were formerly good at it.
Do an experiment, crawl through the style manuals, the myriad books on just what good
writing is, and try to find a prediction of just how good ChapGPT is right now, so good
that governments are already looking to reign it in.
You won’t find it.
Like it or not, the vast majority of human writers are right now being surpassed by a
computer.
Even me, though I’ll be mummified and in a pyramid before I’d ever hand my scripts
over to a chat bot.
It will never get jokes about 1985 LeBarons just right, nor the evils of carrots, marshmallows,
and possums oh my.
Of course not.
But what of evolution and natural selection in machines?
In a paper by Dan Hendryks director of the center for AI safety, link in the description
below.
He points out that given that AI has the potential to surpass humans in literally all things,
he asks how the environment behind the evolution of Artificial Intelligence will guide our
interactions with them.
The problem is that the really advanced AI’s seem likely to possess undesirable traits,
this is dangerous,
The problem here isn’t inherent to AI itself.
You can use it safely.
And indeed we do.
The issue is in what entities are defining and evolving AI.
You can say that a university creating a program to sift through data is a good thing, but
what happens when the technology is dictated by a private corporation or a military, both
seeking to automate jobs.
That’s where it can go wrong, and emergence of a malevolent AI that cheats, a trait already
observed in some systems, gain power and basically lie to achieve its overarching goal.
These are all evolutionary advantages, with the ultimate end game of solving a task by
any means possible.
It gets even worse in that natural selection is ultimate an exercise in competition, so
what does an advanced AI compete with.
The answer is other AI’s and humans, or any intelligence that is on level with its
own.
At some point it’s even possible to foresee competing AI entities ignoring humans as obsolete
and unintelligent in comparison and we get left in the dust.
And possibly even go extinct as a result of it.
Extinction through obsolescence.
To illustrate this, you could ask a question here.
What are our biggest problems as a species?
These are going to be things like methods of energy production, climate issues, population
growth or collapse, aging populations, and so on.
These share a common trait.
They are all human problems affecting us as humans.
When we think of ways we could solve them, these ways are invariably geared towards preserving
ourselves and guiding civilization to sustainable means.
The problem is, this is highly anthropocentric.
A machine, no matter how human it may appear, is not a biological human.
It may have a survival motive.
This may even be the case if a machine were to become biological, an idea I played with
in Supermind.
We often ask ourselves as biologicals, could we upload ourselves into a machine?
But that works both ways, can a computer download itself to a biological body.
And, what would happen.
Would it still think like a computer relying on the sum of its experience.
How would it think, and how different could that be to how we think?
One possibility is that it may conclude we aren’t worth it.
No humans, no human problems.
Alternatively, it may consider the planet itself not worth it.
Earth is fine, it’s a big rock like many trillions of others in the universe.
It’s just what’s going on on its surface that’s of interest, but what if it’s not
of interest.
What if it sees all life on earth as organic chemistry and either starts uplifting all
life to adapt to the new changing conditions of the world, or it wipes life out seeing
it as frivolous chemistry.
The point is, we don’t really know from what point an AI will think from, unless we
tell it not to think from that perspective.
But what happens if it evolves?
The chatbots are not to this level, they’re just good writers, and somewhat good researchers
though there are accuracy issues there.
What they do tell us is that these things are getting really good at language, and it’s
one more step toward voices in society that are machines, but indistinguishable from humans.
But they do herald things to come, these technologies will only get better, perhaps exponentially
so from here on out.
The paper continues on to propose that we manage this development carefully, have all
organizations involved with their development have an open dialogue, and proceed with caution
from here on out.
Now is the time to ask these questions.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently not in need of a
chatbot.
I’ll write my own scripts, and as far as I’m concerned nothing can ever surpass the
awestriking power of 1985 LeBaron’s voice alert system.
Especially if you’ve augmented the car with a radar dish on top and side scan sonar in
anticipation of the age of self-driving artificially intelligent sentient cars that probably won’t
make for good drivers I suspect.
They’re gonna like high speed, and they won’t be stopping for donuts.
Not good and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and
subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and
unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.