The question we must always have for the high tech giants is embedded in this essay at the Internet Health Report:
“Are you going to harm humanity and, specifically, historically marginalized populations, or are you going to sort of get your act together and make some significant structural changes to ensure that what you create is safe and not harmful?”
Given the demonstrated proclivity of many high tech companies to, without adult supervision, create technologies that callously enrich them at our great expense, the above is a great question to ask. Every day. Of every technology.
Check It Out: Are AIs Being Designed to Harm Us?
What do you call a very intelligent human being who doesn’t feel guilt, shame, psychological pain from observed immoral acts, and psychological pleasure for observed altruistic acts? A sociopathic genius. Would you like a socipathic genius to be making decisions for you, especially ethical decisions that can significantly affect your life? (Okay, stop it with the Zuckerberg jokes. For now.) Of course not.
Machines, as far as I know, and as far as people who claim to be experts in them know, can never be made to feel anything, including guilt, shame, pain and pleasure. Even if AI somehow develops real consciousness (something I very highly doubt will ever happen), this will be consciousness without a conscience. So what the whole AI program is really geared at creating machines that are sociopathic geniuses. I don’t see any indication that the most fervent AI cheerleaders seem to realize this, nor the implications thereof.
AI will always reflect humanity until it attains its own intelligence. As immature or mature as the engineers, programmers and manufacturers that build it . One can expect a machine to pick up a weapon and use it to attack someone/something – we see humans do it on the news everyday.
“Given the demonstrated proclivity of many high tech companies to, without adult supervision, create technologies….” The definition of “adult” has changed over the years. Gone are the days of maturity and responsibility, rites of passage. earning a place in society. The success or failure of AI is always the responsibility of human beings.