By Dee Smith
Since the late Middle Ages, Western society—and over the last century, global society—has increasingly replaced religious faith with faith in science and technology as the guiding force of human civilization. Many of us comfort ourselves with the conviction that, whatever problems might arise from technology, further technological progress will always solve them in the end. If you are this kind of believer, my earlier arguments will not seem germane. As believers see it, if you are an AI detractor, then you just don’t get it, by definition. You don’t see the truth and the light that they know to be just over the horizon.
What about that is not a faith-based system?
Shortly before he died last year, the philosopher Daniel Dennett noted that while he did not believe AIs were conscious, he saw an immediate danger that bad actors could nonetheless convince people that an AI is conscious and then use the AI’s putative “authority” to dominate and control others, possibly on a massive scale. That of course is just another form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism, but using a terrifyingly ubiquitous panopticon. It is not necessarily relevant to the question of the Great Filter, but it may be the way AIs are most immediately dangerous to general human well-being today.
As noted in earlier posts in this series, it is also very possible that the entire AI enterprise is largely a mirage or delusion, and that the problems described, along with others, may mean that it is just another technology that is extremely overhyped and overpriced—that is in reality underproductive yet destructive to human society—and will ultimately have at the very best a “meh” outcome. But even if the overall result is mediocre from the standpoint of creating Artificial General Intelligence or some such, the destructive potential of cyber technology should never be underestimated.
When social media (or the Internet itself) began, following the usual course of belief in the inexorability of progress, it was touted as a tool that would break down barriers between people, build tolerance, advance democracy, and so forth. It has turned out to be anything but, and has created extremely corrosive trends substantially increasing human isolation and pathologies associated with it, inspiring and enabling many flavors of extremist behavior, increasing depression (especially among teenagers) and expanding addictive behavior (particularly related to buying things). It has resulted in people in many countries having fewer friends, less social engagement, and less sex (at a time when human populations are falling almost everywhere), and creating a built-in system for surveillance of everyone at a scale and intensity never imagined by any 20th century regime. It will not take a sentient AI to expand this level of harm dramatically.
Or perhaps public sentiment will turn so decisively against AI that, combined with the level of resource use its data centers demand (particularly of electricity and water) and lackluster revenues, it becomes financially impossible to continue to develop at any scale. As noted above, that could lead to a massive global financial collapse because so much capital has already been invested in AI. Somewhere around a quarter of all pension assets in the U.S., for example, are in AI-related investments. Leaders of AI companies must continue to up the hype to try to keep the stock valuations high. But even a massive global depression is hardly likely to be a Great Filter event, at least on its own (although it could lead to a world war). And the hardening of anti-AI public sentiment may largely affect only the West, while the command economy of China continues on developing AI, as do neighboring states. (The Chinese public appears to be less anti-AI, and Malaysia, for example, is encouraging massive investment in data centers without much public dissent.)
If we want to be honest, we have to say that we have no way currently to really assess or judge the validity of any of the issues outlined above.
We have no idea what is going on.
But we may well be taking on the role of the sorcerer’s apprentice, and attempting to wield forces we do not—or perhaps even cannot—understand or control.
There are reasons to be quite concerned about that sorcerer’s apprentice tendency, and in part they have to do with the personal attributes of tech leaders. Many are enraged by any limitations the world seems to put on them, believe these should not apply to them, and in fact, believe they should not apply to humanity as a whole. They believe the destiny of humans and their progeny is to become gods. This is also evident in the quest for extreme long life that many undertake, whether through trying to extend their biological lives indefinitely or by the fantasy of uploading their consciousnesses to computers. It is also evident in the fixation on the “singularity”—a hypothetical conversion point envisioned by futurist Ray Kurzweil at which the worlds of computers and humans merge via super AI and brain-computer interfaces. Some believers think this is around the corner.
The monstrous egoism disregards the knowledge we have about the nature of the world, garnered through centuries of scientific and philosophical inquiry. Suppose indefinite life-extension became technically possible. It would result in a world where the old coveted their power and wealth and there was no room for the next human generations: an ossified human race. But does it also reflect a fear and loathing of life and its messy biological and emotional structures, and the desire to escape into some imagined purer world of crystalline binary digital existence?