{"id":5323,"date":"2014-12-12T09:17:17","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T16:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5323"},"modified":"2014-12-12T14:09:52","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T21:09:52","slug":"oh-no-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5323","title":{"rendered":"Oh no! Robots! Yay!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"solaris5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.\u201d \u2013Hannah Arendt, 1958<\/p>\n

“Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.” \u2013G\u00fcnther Anders, 1956<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that we’ve branded every\u00a0consumer good\u00a0with a computer chip “smart,” the inevitable next step is for robots to start thinking big thoughts, turn us into their menials, and mind-meld into a higher form of life, or lifeyness. Or so we’re told by an (oddly enthusiastic) chorus of putatively rational\u00a0doomsayers. Forget dirty bombs, climate change, and rogue microbes. AI is now the greatest existential threat to humanity.<\/p>\n

Pardon me for yawning. The odds of computers becoming thoughtful enough to decide they want to take over the world, hatch a nefarious plan to do so, and then execute said plan remain exquisitely\u00a0small. Yes, it’s in the realm of the possible. No, it’s not in the realm of the probable. If you want to worry about existential threats, I would suggest that the old-school Biblical ones \u2014 flood, famine, pestilence, plague, war \u2014 are still the best place to set your sights.<\/p>\n

Rob Walker interviewed<\/a> me about The Glass Cage<\/em> for Yahoo Tech, and we touched on this topic:<\/p>\n

\n

You don\u2019t spend much time on the idea that the march of artificial intelligence is \u201csummoning the demon<\/a>\u201d that will destroy humanity, as Elon Musk recently worried aloud. And he\u2019s not the only smart person to frame the issue in apocalyptic, sci-fi terms; it\u2019s become an almost trendy fear. What do you make of that?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably overblown. All those apocalyptic AI fears are based on an assumption that computers will achieve consciousness, or at least some form of self-awareness. But we have yet to see any evidence of that happening, and because we don\u2019t even know how our own minds achieve consciousness, we have no reliable idea of how to go about building self-aware machines.<\/p>\n

There seem to be two theories about how computers will attain consciousness. The first is that computers will gain so much speed and so many connections that consciousness will somehow magically \u201cemerge\u201d from their operations. The second is that we\u2019ll be able to replicate the neuronal structure of our own brains in software, creating an artificial mind.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s possible that one of those approaches might work, but there\u2019s no rational reason to assume they\u2019ll work. They\u2019re shots in the dark. Even if we\u2019re able to construct a complete software model of a human brain \u2014 and that itself is far from a given \u2014 we can\u2019t assume that it will actually function the way a brain functions. The mind may be more than a data-processing system, or at least more than one that can be transferred from biological components to manufactured ones.<\/p>\n

The people who expect a \u201csingularity\u201d of machine consciousness to happen in the near future \u2014 whether it\u2019s Elon Musk or Ray Kurzweil or whoever \u2014 are basing their arguments on faith, not reason. I\u2019d argue that the real threat to humanity is our own misguided tendency to put the interests of technology ahead of the interests of people and other living things.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can read the whole interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image: still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s <\/em>Solaris.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThis future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.\u201d \u2013Hannah […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5323"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5340,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5323\/revisions\/5340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}