The open letter of the Institute for the Future of Life demanding a 6-month pause in the development of artificial intelligence was signed by thousands of influential figures, including Elon Musk. The signatories are concerned that artificial intelligence labs have "entered an uncontrolled race" to develop increasingly powerful systems that no one, including their creators, can understand, predict or control.
How to explain this panic attack of a part of the elite? At the base of the appeal are obviously control and regulation, but whose? During the proposed half-year break during which humanity should consider the risks, who would represent it? Since artificial intelligence laboratories in China, India and Russia will continue to operate (perhaps in secret) a global public debate on this topic is not possible.
However, we need to examine what this is all about. In his book Homo Deus (2015), historian Yuval Noah Harari predicted that the most likely outcome of the development of artificial intelligence will be a radical division within human society, deeper than class. Soon, biotechnology and computer algorithms will join forces to produce "bodies, brains and minds", resulting in a widening gap "between those who know how to construct bodies and brains and those who do not". In such a world, "those who have boarded the train of progress will have the divine ability to create and destroy, while those who are left behind will face extinction."
The panic that emerges from the letter of the Institute for the Future of Life stems from the fear that even those who are on the "train of progress" are not safe. Our digital feudal lords are scared. But they don't want a public debate, but a deal between governments and tech corporations to keep the real power in their hands.
The massive expansion of AI capabilities poses a serious threat to ruling elites, including those who develop, own and control AI. This indicates the end of capitalism as we know it, in terms of the possibility of the emergence of a self-reproducing artificial intelligence system that will require less and less human input (algorithmic trading on the stock market is only the first step in that direction). We are left with a choice between some new form of communism and uncontrolled chaos.
New chatbots will allow many lonely (or not so lonely) people endless evenings of friendly conversation about movies, books, cooking or politics. To use my metaphor again, what people will get is decaffeinated coffee and juice without fruit: a friendly neighbor without dark secrets, an Other tailored to their needs. This is the very essence of fetishistic renunciation: "I know it's not a real person, but it's good for me because it's harmless."
In any case, this open letter is another example of an impossible ban. It is an old paradox: since there is no place for us humans in the post-human future, let's ban its development. In order to determine ourselves according to these technologies, we should ask Lenin's old question: freedom for whom, for what? In what sense were we free before? Aren't we already being controlled much more than we realized? Instead of complaining about threats to freedom and dignity in the future, perhaps we should first consider what freedom means now. Until we do that, we will behave like hysterics who, according to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, are desperately looking for a master, but only one over whom they dominate.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that, thanks to the exponential nature of technological progress, we will soon be dealing with spiritual machines that will not only show all the signs of self-awareness, but will far surpass human intelligence. But this post-human attitude should not be confused with the paradigmatically modern preoccupation with achieving complete technological domination over nature. Instead, we are witnessing a dialectical reversal of this process.
Today's post-human sciences are no longer concerned with domination. Their credo is surprise: what unplanned properties could that black box develop? No one knows, and therein lies the appeal or banality of the whole enterprise.
The French philosopher and engineer Jean-Pierre Dipy thus observed in the new robotics, genetics, nanotechnology, artificial life and artificial intelligence a strange inversion of the traditional anthropocentric arrogance enabled by technology:
"How can we explain that science has become such a risky activity that today many consider it the main threat to the survival of humanity? Some philosophers believe that Descartes' dream of man as the master of nature is wrong and that the basics of our need to understand the world around us should be urgently reexamined. They do not see the main thing, that the technology that appears to us as the origin of all disciplines has as its goal precisely turning away from nature. The engineer of tomorrow will not be a greedy sorcerer's apprentice who got things out of control because of laziness or ignorance, but because he wanted to.
Humanity creates its own god or devil. Although the outcome cannot be predicted, one thing is certain: if something resembling posthumanity emerges as a collective fact, our worldview will lose all three of its defining themes: humanity, nature, and the divine. Human identity can only exist in the face of unfathomable nature, but if life becomes subject to technological manipulation it will lose its natural character. A completely controlled existence is devoid of meaning, not to mention randomness and wonder.
The same, of course, applies to any sense of the divine. The human experience of God makes sense only from the standpoint of human finitude and mortality. Once we become homo deus and we create properties that seem supernatural from the old human perspective, the gods as we knew them will disappear. The question is what, if anything, will remain. Will we worship the artificial intelligence we have created?
We have good reason to worry that techno-gnostic visions of a post-human world are actually ideological fantasies that obscure the abyss that awaits us. Needless to say, we need much more than 6 months to prevent people from becoming irrelevant and their lives devoid of any meaning in the near future.
(Project Syndicate/Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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