Most everyone reading this will be familiar with the following classic example of an AI gone awry:
AI:
"What is your command?"
Society:
"We are running low on paperclips. Please make as many as you can until I come back"
...and just like that all the matter in the universe becomes a heap of paper clips.
While being an extreme example, the paperclip optimizer AI demonstrates what happens when an overly simplistic logical imperative is executed to the fullest extent. Writings outlining similar faulty imperatives are nothing new in the AI community, but there is something bothersome about the timelines that researchers give about future negative AI consequences.
AI researchers disagree about the specifics of when a malignant AI could be created. Predictions range from 10 years to 300 years into future, but no one seems to speculate that humanity has already created a malignant AI. It is the purpose of this essay to argue that humanity has already given birth to several AIs that could do massive harm to human civilization.
In Nick Bostrom's book "Super Intellegence", one possible path to a super human level AI is the creation of a collective AI. A collective AI is one that connects many subhuman or human level intelligences into one super intelligent structure that functions as a unit. It is hypothesized that although each server on the internet is by itself not all that intelligent, the internet could become super-intelligent if all of the servers were directed towards solving one singular problem. With the advent of cognitive web APIs in areas such as speech recognition, object recognition, and sentiment analysis, it isn't too difficult to conceptualize how such an AI would arise. However, this essay will not argue that the combination of Watson, Cortana, and Siri could currently take over the world. What it will argue is that an AI does not need to be composed of purely non biological entities to become a super intelligent AI with a will of its own.
Do you think that the cells in your body know that they are lying when you tell your boss that his project timeline is OK? As Aristotle wrote: "the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts". The conscious entity that we call a human emerges out of such a collection of cells without the cells having knowledge of the greater whole. Douglas Hofstader in his book Godel, Escher, Bach tells a humorous fable about Aunt Hillary who is a sentient ant hill that communicates by having its ants leave trails on the ground in the form of decipherable symbols. Hofstader's widely acclaimed writing elicits an intuitive understanding that the brain's power arises from the pattern of trails that the neuronal white matter creates throughout the brain. Similarly, looking one fractal level higher than brains, computer networks seem to not just be an interconnection of computers but more of an interconnection of the brains that utilize those computers. Even dating back to before the invention of the digital computer, technology such as language, writing, and the printing press has allowed human minds to transfer moderate amounts of data amongst themselves.
This interconnection of brains has allowed two fundamental structures to emerge out of the world's collection of humans: Governments and Corporations. Cells are not capable of contemplating the emergent consciousness of "human" that their interactions help to create. Cells do not understand that humans have desires, subjective experiences, or wills of their own. Similarly, it would be odd for a human to think that corporations or governments have desires, subjective experience, or an individual determination. Why is that though?
It seems that many of the worlds most influential corporations and governments are no longer controlled by the founders that created them. Many of the founders of these entities are dead and the organization has outlived them. Setting up a mission statement and culture for a corporation is like setting up the initial conditions for an AI explosion in that if the corporation is complex enough, the initial conditions might have little prediction power on the future of the corporation. Richard Branson, in his autobiography, said that it was incredibly difficult trying to wrestle back private control of the Virgin group after he decided that going public was a bad idea. Elon Musk has said that he will not go public with SpaceX until it is certain that a Mars colony will be established. In Elon's biography by Ashley Vance, one gets a glimpse of how easy it is for a founder to lose control and for the company to lose sight of its initial mission, which is why SpaceX is holding back on going public.
While governments and corporations have given us many great things like supermarkets and computers, it is obvious that governments and corporations have the power to do great harm. There is really no argument on that point. The oil industry pumps CO2 into the atmosphere, Lockheed & Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman continue to make human killing devices, congress seems completely out of control, and practically everyone is wondering how their pefered US presidential candidate to hate (doesn't matter which one) are even eligible to become president.
The answer is that the entity that controls the activities of the corporations and governments is as much as an emergent property of the system as the self referential "I" is in the system of cells that reside in our bodies. The system as a whole maintains control of the activities it engages in.
We have created intelligences greater than our parts by using the technologies of law, the printing press, and now computers. In Hofstader's fable about the intelligence of Aunt Hillary, the main character who interacts the sentient ant colony is an ant eater. Aunt Hillary grants the ant eater, whom is her friend, permission to eat some of the ants in the colony if they begin getting out of line. They call it "Ant Colony Brain Surgery". The surgery helped optimize Aunt Hillary's thought patterns. If we aren't careful we might allow the entities of corporations and governments to perform a similar surgery. What's worse is that many of these entities operate under a simplistic optimization goal much like that of the paper clip optimizer. GDPJobsFashionHeinzKetchup
This essay is not to advocate for the dismantling of such super structures, rather it is simply to change your perspective on the organizations we have instantiated. If you regard yourself as a conscious subjective being with a will of your own that is somehow composed of many less intelligent parts, would it not be wise to consider that the corporations and governments we have created also exhibit a self determination?