The mass media hysteria behind the AI “threats” is approaching deafening intensity. Unless you live in a cave, you are exposed to the daily barrage of articles and TV shows about AI’s which, according to the media, threaten the very survival of mankind. Just this morning, in a span of few minutes I came across several articles which, if true would make me crawl right back into my Neanderthal cave to get as far from the AI’s as possible.
To start with, the New York Times writer Maureen Dowd who is otherwise endowed with a rather sharp tongue is positively gushing in her Vanity Fair article about the “alpha male” Elon Musk whose “Billion dollar crusade will stop the AI apocalypse” and “save humanity from machine-learning overlords”. Maureen, somewhat out of her character, seems truly frightened by the idea that those evil AI’s “may be even worse existential threat than Donald Trump”. She also quotes the famous Musk claim that “AI’s will wipe out mankind like a virus”.
Surprisingly, the answer to this dire threat seems to be to separate our fallible, fleshy and mortal bodies from our eternal minds and merge with those pesky silicon AI’s. The Guardian writer Olivia Solon also quotes Musk as she writes that “humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant” and that “sophisticated artificial intelligence will make ‘house cats’ of humans”. But wait, all is not lost yet, Elon Musk is working on “injectable mesh-like neural lace to achieve symbiosis with machines”. We can be saved after all! The idea of “neural lace” seems suspiciously similar to the old AI dream of “jacking directly into your brain”, bypassing those limiting human senses which are nothing but a nuisance for serious thinking. The techniques for this simple innovation “will all be available within 4–5 years”. At best it will not work, at worst it could cause serious brain damage.
The separation of body and mind is a major obsession with the AI prophets. Guardian, which seem to be particularly focused on AI, in an another article titled: ‘Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.’ The road to immortality, discovered that “the technology to extend life — by uploading minds to exist separately from the body — is only a few years away” I guess that would be, say 4–5 years? The article quotes a veritable list of who is who in AI and the “cognitive science” field: Richard Dawkins who claims that “it must be possible to construct life chemically or in a computer”, Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive science at Carnegie Mellon who is convinced that “the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies”, Ray Kurzweil, a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading claims that “an emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system would run much faster than our biological brains.”
It is rather remarkable that many of these science visionaries seem to be inspired by their “lifelong reading of science fiction” as Michael Abrash, lead of Oculus software team bluntly put it during his Facebook F8 keynote. The Guardian article quotes transhumanist and “computational neuroscientist” Randal Koene, who after reading Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars solved the thorny issue of the mind upload. “First, you scan the pertinent information in a person’s brain — the neurons and their connections.That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brain’s neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. The whole point is substrate independence, i.e. to exist outside of a human body. It seems to me that Scientology may have a jump start on AI in this area.
Another Transhumanist, Nick Bostrom, the Oxford University director of its Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center criticizes human nature as a “work in progress, half-baked beginning that we can learn and remold in “desirable” ways”. By “responsibly using science and technology we shall manage to become posthuman beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have”. As far as the intellectual capacity goes, transhumans “will be able to read with perfect recollection and understanding, every book in the library of Congress”.
Such wonders make me feel inferior already. All of this may be funny but there is a larger point I am trying to make. Why would our Ivy league universities give lifelong tenures to researchers with such naive views? And why would the mass media amplify their adolescent dreams and terrify millions of the US citizens with an endless, nauseating repetition of these imaginary threats on all channels?
The answer may come from none other than the venerable Stephen Hawking, who recently claimed that “we need some form of world government to protect us from the escalation of technology and artificial intelligence.” Add to this the fact that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, another big AI proponent, is also the chairman of Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and that Elon Musk is a frequent Pentagon visitor and the answers may start to present themselves. The population which is scared out of their wits by murderous AI’s may be more amenable to approving the rising military budgets and seeking the protection of the world government at the same time, contradictory as those goals may be.
Now, for the good news. First, to state the obvious, our “mainstream” media are not so mainstream anymore. In fact, it seems that the broadcast media, like print and television are dying. They can still destroy the ideas and people, they can still start wars and boost military budgets, but there are cracks in their armor. They created the Trump phenomenon to stop the other candidates during the GOP primaries but they could not stop him from becoming the US president in the end. And, like the proverbial sorcerers apprentice, they got the AI genie out of the bottle but they may not be able to put it back. When it fizzles out, they will lose the remaining trust of their already shrinking audiences. According to recent Gallup poll, the consumer trust in the US mass media went from 55% in 2002 to less than 20% today. But there maybe a light at end of the tunnel for the mass media after all. Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings recently suggested that in 50 years its customers might be AI’s rather than humans. Problem solved:)