In the beginning, the Creator gave humans the ability to create, but not to the same degree that He could. He gave us the ability to create futures—to harness the power of life, imagination, and reason; but we could not create living things. He could create living things. We could only convert matter from one form to another. We used that ability to make tools out of iron, houses out of wood, cities out of concrete and steel.
We have the ability to plant gardens, cross-breed plants and animals for desirable traits, and shape our environment to help life to thrive; but try as we might, we cannot create new forms of life.
One area that might seem like an exception to the rule is our ability to create institutions (sometimes referred to as Systems). Institutions, such as corporations, religious entities, and governments are conceptual structures that seem to take on a life of their own.
Despite the spiritual energy they embody, institutions are just human artifices that simply channel human energy into specific directions through coercive means. We often imbue them with incredible power which can be used for good but are typically eventually bent toward evil. Institutions always tend toward evil because they give power to the people at the top, and the human lust for power is insatiable. It is not for mere superstition that the ancients believed that demons ruled human institutions.
Because they embody spiritual energy, we often compare institutions to living organisms. For instance, “corporation” comes from the latin root “corpus,” or “body.” Institutions, like any physical structure, tend toward decay. Some might say that they are destined to die, and while that may be a useful mental picture, I think it’s more accurate to treat them as machines than as living organisms. After all, the only volition they possess is that of the people who empower them.
Hammers rust, houses decay, cities crumble into ruins. I suspect that the inhabitants of Chicago cannot envision a world without the City of Big Shoulders; but then, I suspect that the ancient Mayans never thought that Chichen Itza would ever be reabsorbed by the jungle.
The same goes for institutions. Someday, Apple, Google, and Microsoft will be footnotes on the historical records of the Digital Age. And later, even those records will be reduced to their constituent elements. I suppose that this also goes for the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Catholic Church, and all the kingdoms of men.
So what’s all this got to do with AI?
First of all, “artificial intelligence” is a misleading term. It is most definitely artificial. Intelligent, it is not. It is more like a complex machine or a really big calculator. The computer programs that we label artificial intelligence are a type of machine that simply takes massive amounts of human inputs, runs them through a gonculator, and spits out some outputs.
Let’s not delude ourselves. There’s no question that AI tools have the potential to become very powerful. It seems they will have a tremendous capacity for influence over human thought and behavior—mostly because the average person tends to be gullible. The prospects are, naturally, quite frightening. I’ve even heard some people postulate that AI systems will take on demonic personas.
From a rationalistic standpoint, this seems fanciful; but if you look a few years into the future, given human behavior thus far, it’s not that farfetched to imagine that human artifices, amplified by several orders of digital magnitude, will tend towards evil, which will look awfully demonic when people start suffering under their use.
I’m no expert in data analysis, but I’d like to offer one insight that might help us navigate the brave new world which the power hungry will try to govern with ultra-powerful calculators. There is one thing that we humans who possess actual, honest-to-goodness, God-given, intelligence have that an AI entity will never have: the ability to conduct true qualitative analysis. That means that we, as autonomous, volitional beings, can make our own subjective value judgments.
AI programs are not capable of subjective qualitative analysis. They cannot make autonomous value judgments. Depending on the skill level of their programmers, they have the potential to be excellent at quantitative analysis. They will be able to comb through massive databases and interpolate an answer to a question, but any qualitative analysis—any value judgment, will be the product of the programmer (and his biases) and the preponderance of the inputs (the data set) that the AI entity gets to chew on. Basically, any qualitative analysis must come either from a biased programmer or the aggregate value judgments of the people who create the data set or both.
The point is that AI entities will be powerful, but they will never will never achieve sentience. They will never be human. We should take a realistic—and therefore cautious—view of AI, neither unreservedly embracing it nor ascribing to it powers that it does not and can not possess.
Like every other creation of man, it will have some capacity for good but will certainly be bent to fulfill the agendas of the power hungry. And like every creation of man, it will decay and disintegrate. Or, if you prefer, the iHuman will die, and the demons will need to seek other herds of swine to drive over cliffs.
Featured image by Sathish kumar Periyasamy.
The Wild Frontier 