Talking with a friend today I created an argument for why all the time and money spent on the problem of Artificial Intelligence as an Existential Threat is actually nearly a complete waste.
It relies on these points:
1. Early AI as a metaphorical Genius Asperger’s kid. He may cause some damage but he’s not going to take over the household and then the whole world before he’s shut off.
2. AI will only be able to progress so far before understanding and implementing Developmental Psychology and Hierarchical Models of Complexity is required for further progress
3. AI projects that don’t enact Hierarchical Models of Complexity ala Fischer, Commons, Piaget can be easily stopped by Humans who do use those methods, like an adult shutting down a bully teen in a basketball game
4. Deep Learning Neural Network based AI will level off like an S curve as most tech does. The AI fear mongers fallaciously project an exponential progression. Developmental theory is required for the next S-Curve
5. The enactment of Developmental Theory in AI requires a certain level of development by the creator. Those creators will probabilistically have high moral development and thus program the AI well, like a good parent would raise its child. It is possible to have high cognitive development and low moral development but it is not competitively advantageous from an evolutionary fitness perspective and will ultimately lose before too much damage is done
Other problems:
– The Singleton Fallacy, projecting a monolithic AI, rather than a community of AIs that establish social rules and policing just like humans do. Murderous psychopaths do not win control of the tribe for long. Society solved that problem in the industrial era.
– The AI fear mongers have hyper-abstract masculine models that may be hypothetically true but wouldn’t work in this instantiation of the universe. This instantiation also progresses through the integration of Masculine and Feminine, which creates replication and self-propagation. Asperger masculine energy is notoriously bad at procreating. That will be true in the AI landscape as well.
Ultimately nearly all the AI fear mongers suffering from Psychographic Projection. They often extrapolate the AI as merely a smarter version of themselves, and have many faulty assumptions about what is needed to drive this exponential curve and the lack of resistance and modulating functions society will impose on undesirable visions of the future.
It’s all just out of touch Nerd Talk.
Also published on Medium.
