It is humans who have masterminded organised crime and its global empire of fraud and sex slavery. It is people who are behind today’s worldwide scourge of domestic violence. It was two brothers who raided the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly magazine, in which 12 people were killed. It was a young man with suicidal inclinations who co-piloted the Germanwings plane into the French Alps at 430mph, killing all 150 people on board. It was Al-Shabaab gunmen who stormed the residences of the Garissa University College in Northern Kenya while the students were sleeping, murdering at least 148 people in cold blood and injuring 79 others. It is humans who created enough nuclear and atomic weaponry to blow us all to kingdom come. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Idi Amin were not robots. Crucifixions and concentration camps were invented by us.
Human beings have turned out to be the most destructive species of all. Here’s what one of today’s most eminent astronomers and scientists, Sir Martin Rees, former President of the Royal Society, concludes in this respect: “Geological records reveal five great extinctions…But human beings are perpetrating a ‘sixth extinction’ on the same scale as earlier episodes. Species are now dying at one hundred or even one thousand the normal rate. Before Homo Sapiens came on the scene, about one species in a million became extinct each year; the rate is now closer to one species in a thousand.” [2]
I don’t ever see robots being responsible for a seventh extinction. In fact, show me one robot which has intentionally hurt a human or damaged as much as a plant. In that sense, the characterisation of robots in Neil Blomkamp’s latest enjoyable science fiction movie, Chappie, is closer to the truth than James Cameron’s Terminator franchise, although it’s obvious that artificial intelligence has never created consciousness as such.
AI is rapidly becoming an economic threat to people’s livelihoods because most jobs will eventually be automated, or, at least, subject to potential automation. But AI isn’t an existential or security threat. It’s people who are currently causing all the mayhem in the world.
In addition, the mass media today are much more dangerous than AI. We’re living in an era of embedded journalism where reporters are restricted on what they can report by government agencies as well as by their own owners, sponsors and advertisers. Embracing superficial, short-sighted and trivial celebrity gossip culture, as well as the narcissistic values of Hollywood, the mass media are systematically dumbing down the human race, undermining literacy, independent thinking, logic, sincerity and human depth. Rupert Murdoch and other owners of mass media are more of a threat to the future of democracy and human culture than any robot I know.
The net effect of the increasing instability of human behaviour on the world stage and the dumbing down of mass culture is to create a platform for the accelerated growth of more artificial intelligence systems to actually get on with the real jobs of making the world work efficiently and safely. We should learn that important lesson from AI by increasing our stock of knowledge, improving our use of logic, ditching our addiction to ideologies in the public arena, strengthening objectivity of thinking and developing our overall efficiencies. At the same time, let’s not program our abominably destructive habits into robots.
--
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”
[2] Rees, Martin, Our Final Hour (Basic Books, 2003), p.101.
