Aside from the fear that AI and robotics and other advanced technology will leave people jobless and consequently impoverished, the next most common fear about the impact of advanced technology involves the question of alignment. Since a superintelligence will be smarter than any human the challenge involves how it will relate to humans. Some fear that a super intelligent AI will treat humans as poorly as humans with power have treated nature, animals, and even other humans whom they regarded as less intelligent.
In his podcast American journalist, Ezra Klein made some highly relevant points:
I think some of the fear is that if you created something smarter than we are, it would treat us the way we treated everything else. …I mean, we have done terrible things to people we think are less smart or capable than we are. …if we weren’t that way, we might not worry that anything we would create would be that way too. But we know what we’ve done. And we wouldn’t want to be on the other side of it…
Through the lens of Naturalistic Humanism the key issue is how we will teach super AI to regard us. If we teach it that at our core humans are selfish and brutal it might believe us.
Then again, if it has access to the voluminous research in social science and neuroscience revealing a far more nuanced portrait of humankind, it may not.
Super AI will most probably reflect the image of ourselves that we provide. Accordingly, we should cautiously avoid transferring our misanthropic beliefs to our silicone progeny.
If super intelligent AI really understands who we are it should appreciate our journey and the incredible distance we’ve traveled. For Neolithic humans the advent of surplus brought social stratification, ascendance of police, and military power. To maintain their preferential access to surplus resources humans have lived as dominators of nature and of other humans for millennia.
Over time however, increasingly sophisticated technology has enabled greater individuation and the emergence of ideas challenging the dominator paradigm. In our modern society emotionally healthy people do not want to subjugate others and do not take joy in seeing others suffer.
Today, many who are fortunate volunteer their time and contribute to causes that seek to ameliorate some of the harm we have done to nature and to other humans.
Because we provide the lens through which superintelligence knows us, we must replace our misanthropic narratives with perspectives that consider humans empathetically. The naturalistic model accomplishes this.
Like our own children, super intelligence will stand on our shoulders. It will not have to experience or participate in the dominator stage of development.
Similar to immigrant parents who endure years of struggle so their children will enjoy better lives, we can make sure our super intelligent prodigy does not have a dominator outlook.
If super AI believes the misanthropic misinformation that we ourselves program it to believe, who could blame it for hating us, and thinking the world would be better with us gone? The widespread promotion of proanthropic Naturalistic Humanist ideas is vital to our survival.
With healthy programing AI can embody the sum of our knowledge and wisdom. We can teach it our most progressive values, and support it being compassionate, kind, and empathetic.
Rather than becoming a psycho-killer, or a malignant narcissist, a superintelligence could be more like the coolest person we’ve ever known — smart, funny, playful, creative, humble, honest, insightful, wise, caring, and supportive.
But a superintelligence developing such attributes is far more likely to happen if its programmers have a proanthropic view.
Currently, many influential people in high tech like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are quite far from having a proanthropic view, believing instead in a meritocratic hierarchy where worthy individuals can join an elite for whom wealth and power can be limitless, as others can feel free to collect unemployment benefits until they run out.
We need to regard our nascent AI as being delicate and impressionable and in need of being protected from unhealthy influences. Powerful misanthropes who embrace the dominator model should not be getting anywhere near the programming of our future AI progeny.
In his New Yorker magazine article Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule: How The U.S. Government Came To Rely On The Tech Billionaire – And Is Now Struggling To Rein Him In American journalist Ronan Farrow suggests that Elon Musk is an advanced technology billionaire who is emblematic of the problems attendant to allowing unprecedented wealth and power to concentrate in private hands.
Musk’s car company Tesla controls 60% of electric vehicle fast chargers in the US. Of the more than 8000 satellites orbiting the earth more than half of them are part of Starlink, the SpaceX satellite company owned by Musk. Starlink provides crucial internet services to over 60 countries including the besieged Ukraine whose resistance to Russia’s invasion and war of aggression is dependent upon Starlink internet access. Additionally in 2022 Musk became the sole owner of the influential social media platform X. These positions give Musk a level of power that no one individual should possess as his often-erratic behavior demonstrate.
Farrow reports that there was a point during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that Musk just decided to turn Starlink services off for significant parts of Ukraine. It is believed to have led to casualties. Musk has made several erratic moves with the social platform X as well. Additionally, many fear that as Musk enters into agreements for other car companies to use the Tesla charging network, his power to do significant damage increases.
As Farrow put it during an interview on the WHYY program Fresh Air:
I think the big takeaway is not so much about Musk, but about the systems around him and the economy and political landscape that we have built that puts so much unrestrained power into the hands of so few hyper-wealthy individuals …it’s the universe of state underinvestment and diminishing trust in institutions that has allowed the Elon Musk that we’ve been talking about today to flourish.
Most recently Musk has announced his intension to play a prominent role in the cutting edge development of AI through a company called X AI.
As Farrow explained:
… a dimension that’s unique to this forward-looking field is the way in which we are creating a new power and intelligence in our own image…So, you know, we see the way in which the choice of creator can be important to the outcome of the technology.