The Double Ethical Bottleneck of A.I.
This is a small excerpt from my book The Journey Towards Compassionate A.I. The whole book describes the why’s, what’s and how’s concerning this.
Getting through the A.I. bi-bottleneck
On the road towards genuine super-A.I. – encompassing all domains of intelligence and in each being much more effective than humans – I see not one but two bottlenecks. This is no guarantee that after the bottlenecks, there will be heaven on earth, but let us suppose now that, from the day after, all will be well indeed.
That enables us to focus on the bottlenecks.
- The first one is human-made. Either rogue or naïve developers may take very wrong decisions. There is a sheer infinite amount of scenarios that one can think about. In the next section, I give a few examples. One may be enough not to need to fear any other anymore. It is the end, my friend.
- The second bottleneck is A.I.-made. On its way towards super-A.I. and beyond, there may be many stages and many changes. Even if the final stage is benevolent, and even if most stages are benevolent, it’s enough for only one stage to be less human-friendly, and we’re gone.
The bi-bottleneck may be quite long with many different stages.
Will humanity be able to control to a sufficient degree everything that can happen?
I think, and repeat, that reliance on control alone will not save us. I also don’t think we should relinquish all control and hope with crossed fingers that A.I. will eventually be Compassionate just like that, after the bottleneck as well as at any stage along. So, we should very well think about control, AND we should think about Compassion. BOTH are indispensable.
I hope that this book will be a wake-up call in this direction.
Related Posts
The Meaning of a Word
“The meaning of a word is its use in the language.” — Quote by Wittgenstein, who talked about language games because ‘use in the language’ can be seen as having a very playful aspect. A dictionary provides the meaning of a word ― in some way, but always as an approximation. A word doesn’t have meaning like Read the full article…
A.I. from Future to Now
While it’s challenging to imagine how future A.I. will look like, we can develop an abstract idea that helps us understand present-day urgencies. Of course, one day, the future will be a million years from now. However, for the purpose of this text, we can see it as something like a century from now. There Read the full article…
Inspiration is Key to A.I. Research
A.I. research should prioritize rationality as well as profound human depth (inspiration). As you may know, this is a perfect Aurelian combination. It’s relevant to much inventive thinking, arguably most of all to A.I. research. The initial phase of research should focus on thinking about the problem. No papers, whiteboards, discussions, or code – just Read the full article…