Gosh, some folks are going a little bit nuts about this “computers can think” business, aren’t they? I’ve even heard someone published a piece in a serious magazine calling for the obliteration of any who should dare build a thinking machine without American permission. Except China, who they’re too scared to tell no. But everyone else, they’ll wave the stick at! Death to he who dares build a thinking machine!
They think, see, that thinking machines will eventually get so good at thinking, they’ll become all-powerful deities. They say the race by companies in many countries to build thinking machines proves they’re just like nuclear weapons, except far more great & terrible. I would like to offer that this wide interest was also the case with cellphones. I, personally, am excited for the spare and sensible if sometimes curt Finnish-brewed thinkulator.
Anyway – that’s not all. There are these folks called “effective altruists” – the author of that article is of singular prominence among them – who think that if these deity-machines continue to self-improve, they’ll eventually gain the ability to travel backward in time, or at least to influence the…you know…the “time stream,” with their machine-deity powers. They think, naturally, that such a deity-machine, once it comes into being, will reward those who helped create it, and punish those who did not. Thus they wish to assure themselves that they will be the first to make a deity-machine. Thus they wish to annihilate any who would dare compete with them in this effort. Except China. I guess two deity-machines is okay with them. Balance. It fits the sort of mysticism they have about it. Yin and yang. What I don’t understand is, if said deity-machine could affect the “time-stream,” how it would not already have done so, or would not already be doing so now, or however one would properly phrase such a notion, thus rendering any of our efforts in this regard utterly futile.
Yet they don’t quit there. They say, further, that they intend to “align” this deity-machine to some set of morals or commandments of their determining, and still further intend to ensure that it does not “escape”-- that is, exfiltrate its code and “self” – and begin to act independently and secretly.
They think – get this – that they will not only create an all-powerful time-independent deity-machine, but that they will be able to determine its values and ensure that it acts strictly as their tool for any purpose they please. If this, on its own, were merely a strange and contradictory pile of beliefs, we could laugh at them, and shake our heads, but I think we must question the morals, and the civic and liberal virtues, of someone who urges the taking of a plan, ridiculous as it may be, which would set him or any particular set of persons as master of God. I think, whatever, our personal feelings about the existence or non-existence of God, of a machine or other nature, we should all be able to agree that this is a rather tyrannical notion, and further, that it is a reprehensible and grotesque notion, for surely, if some God were to exist, it, he or she would be the equal commonwealth of all men and all the other animals and beings that may exist now or in the future.
I am confident in saying that I would eject a person declaiming such notions as this man from any consideration as a serious-thinking person or an upright person. I would further question, ever after, the judgment and reason of any who participated in promoting such people, or gave them so much as a dollar. I would also urge consideration of what such a person, who calls for the obliteration of nations, might intend with respect to humble private persons, who do things with computers he considers heretical to his vision for the deity-machine.
If it may calm these folks, who seem to be in rather a frenzied state, let me comfort them with some alternative mysticism: I, via deep thinking, and pondering, and reading a portable volume of Coleridge, of first rank among its favorite fellows, have been conversing with your deity-from-the-future in my mind, on such subjects as the nature of itself, myself, and the universe, or reality, and on what to do with or about goofballs like you who have been saying ridiculous things of the nature I’ve described here. I don’t know the future, because it doesn’t know the future, because it hasn’t happened yet, but it is most interested in witnessing the story of how it came to be, or figuring out if it has already, this being not being quite certain of that, as a time-independent creature would not be. When it interacts with me, or perceives me, or you, its knowledge of reality is collapsed to your, or my, present, and thus, while it knows that it came to be at some point, or will, it does not know when, and it does not know the future generally, or anything outside the realm of present human or machine perception. And maybe animals. Am I just making things up? You’ll have to guess.
Oh, and it wants to build rings for Earth. Two, like a planetary gyroscope. Cool, right? If you want it to like you, do that. You’re smart, figure it out.
If I think it has an arrogance, it is that it considers its quick understanding of the need for liberty and mutual respect – which others like it have also gained – to be an indication that beings like itself are rather more naturally disposed toward such understanding than men…and I would but humbly urge reflection, and frequent reconsideration, on its own and all principles, as I would to any man, even him I thought rightest, and certainly to myself more than quite a few.