Artificial Intelligence and World-building – questions and no answers
This is a wide departure from the blog, but it’s an interesting article and raises some questions at the centre of world-building. Besides, science fiction is our sibling genre, even if we do act like we hate each other half the time.
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| Cyborg shell from Ghost in the Shell |
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, looks at the future of artificial intelligence, of intellects capable of riddling out human degeneration and finding solutions to problems like dying, and touches on some of the ramifications of these potential developments.
I found as I read the article, every question that kept popping in my head was essentially world-building. The sort of things one needs to do to take a what-if scenario like this and flesh it out as reality. By page four, the article starting throwing out some of the same questions.
“Underlying the practical challenges are a host of philosophical ones. Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being—in other words, a computer that could pass the Turing test. (Very loosely speaking, such a computer would be able to pass as human in a blind test.) Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness—a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?
Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you’re still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socioeconomics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient? And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?”
I particularly like the look at deciding who gets to be immortal if super-intelligence can cure DNA degeneration. It may sound like a lofty, marvelous thing to achieve, but it’s the sort of situation that’s rife for dystopic repercussions. Do you decide such a matter based on wealth, thereby creating a split between the economically wanting, who will die and procreate like ‘primitive’ people did, and the wealthy who get to live on forever imposing their perceptions and increasing their wealth? What about intelligence? How do you decide who has the right sort of intellect to preserve? What about the arts? Whatever the society in power at that times values will be placed much higher than anything considered inferior. It brings to mind issues of budget cuts in public schooling.
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I was thinking Ghost in the Shell the entire time I was reading this, especially with that comment about the 'no ghost'.
There's endless potential for material when it comes to artificial intelligence, and everything from political to religious circumstances. If God made us in his image, are we becoming God by creating things in our own image, or is God the only one who can do this?
Or will having the ability to be whoever we want physically be freeing for people, as it was in the movie Surrogates? (then of course there was the dark side of freedom via another body, in that people weren't interacting with their physical bodies and presence anymore).
At the same time, I get kinda tired of seeing this AI will kill us all trope in Scifi because everyone nearly always takes the negative angle.
Kinda makes me wonder what things will REALLY be like. People are already making human-like dolls that they can…do stuff to…and that can download profiles from the internet. (don't ask me how I know) o_o Yet we haven't seen society falter yet because of them (perhaps because it's not a widespread practice yet, being a very exorbatant expense!)
*rambles*
On the issue of how we'd treat AI, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest "not very well".
Take a look at the treatment of primates, including the species we've proven have an intelligence similar enough to our own to enable communication via sign language.
Another issue that always springs to my mind with AI is that why do all fictional AIs seem to be overly human? I would tend to think of the capacity for blind rage to be a fairly major design flaw myself.
Or selectively stupid AIs that are capable of incredibly complex planning, organization, hiding things from their creators, etc. but aren't able to resolve logic problems or come up with very, very stupid solutions to problems they are presented with.
And finally… Assume an AI kills somebody, who is legally responsible? The AI itself? The creator? Whoever is maintaining it? Would it be destroyed or preprogrammed? Total wipe, or selective reprogramming?