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Among AI's many obvious dangers, perhaps the least disputable is the one that is drawn from humanity's collective experience integrating all of the tools that they have discovered hitherto -- as in, none of them were integrated at all. The steam engine made hash of the civilizational moral imperative to work for one's living. Suddenly, instead of N people's labor being needed to support N people, 0.1N or 0.2N people's labor could support N people. What was there for the others to do? So all -- exactly all -- of the political debates of the long 19th and 20th Centuries (where politics is taken to include war) were based on the pretense that the steam engine had no such consequence. Or how about radio? The invention of radio made it impossible to secure national boundaries. Ask any dictator (and every nation has one): if information can cross borders, then it does not even matter whether persons or money or goods also can. School's out, game's over. Do you want to seal your border? What (in principle) a fine idea! Just round up all radio-based technology and put it beyond use. But "all" means everywhere in the world, and in space. Briefly, the human species has the rational capacity to invent toys for itself but absolutely no emotional capacity to think through or confront the consequences of possessing them or the implications of using them. This is the doom of AI, just as it was and still is the doom of the printing press, the steam engine, radio, television, social media, etc., etc., etc. |