Stephen Hawking’s posthumous book published eight months after his March 2018 death, warns that humanity faces an existential threat from the development of “a super-intelligent AI”.
Hawking was just 21 and a Ph.D. student in Cambridge, England, when he was diagnosed with a very rare, slow-progressing form of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Condemned by doctors to live a short life, he defied the odds and lived for over five more decades, producing groundbreaking research in theoretical cosmology and theoretical physics. Coincidentally, Hawking was born exactly 300 years after Galileo’s death (January 8, 1642) and died on Einstein’s birthday, March 14.
Like Einstein, Hawking achieved scientific celebrity and worldwide stardom while alive – not something that happens to many scientists. His opinions are quoted widely and wary views on AI are similar to scientific superstar, Elon Musk’s. In Hawking’s final book, called ‘Brief Answers to the Big Questions’, Stephen offers his answers to 10 fundamental questions that he was constantly asked throughout his life. The questions range from whether he thinks there’s a god (no), to if aliens exist (yes), and whether time travel is possible (maybe).
This position is not a new one; Hawking often spoke about his misgivings around artificial intelligence like in 2014, when he warned that a super-AI could end humanity if deployed carelessly. In 2015, Hawking called for more research on the societal impacts of AI as well. AI could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization” unless society finds a way to control its development, Hawking said in 2017.
While artificial intelligence is likely to drastically change our lives in the future, we believe that humanity is a long way from a general artificial intelligence that would have ‘self-sustaining long-term goals and intent’. We should be reasonable, not worried or unworried.
It is reasonable to be mindful of the inherent unpredictability of creativity: both the creativity of humans in designing AI and the creativity of some future AI. The former means that we cannot predict how fast (super-)human-level AI will be developed. The latter means that we cannot predict what interests a given (super-)human-level AI would pursue any more than we can predict what interests a given human will pursue. However, we can know the methods—the cognitive mechanisms—by which humans and human-like—i.e., anthronoetic—AI will pursue their interests. And these methods, we argue will ultimately constrain future AI—and humans—to converge on moral solutions.
I have argued in the negative. A superintelligence, be it AI, biological, or otherwise, could not be evil/totalitarian because totalitarianism is inherently static: intellectually and morally (and hence technologically, politically) such a system cannot make the progress necessary to attain, sustain, and evolve (improve) itself.
This is because a prerequisite to progress are mechanisms (e.g., traditions, institutions, etc.) of free conjectures and criticisms, which are categorically incompatible with totalitarianism. The argument resembles that for the necessity of altruism to have evolved: organisms that were not reciprocally altruistic could not survive.
Superintelligence extends this logic (whether it be a mind or a civilization). A superintelligence would need to be linguistically competent, and linguistic competence all but entails moral goodness, not evil. This is not to say that linguistically competent entities cannot be evil—one need merely review the history of totalitarians. But, I am including in linguistic competence a dialectical competence: a competence for an inner dialogue with your “daemon” (in Plato’s words), your “inner witness” (in Adam Smith’s words), your conscience (in C.S. Lewis’s words). And by this definition or criterion of linguistic competence, totalitarians are linguistically incompetent: they speak—and think—in clichés.
It follows that a superintelligent AI would necessarily be good, not evil. However, that may not be true of a weak AI built upon deep learning.
Plato observed that evil is not a “something”; it is a “nothing”. That is, evil is the absence of goodness. Hence, programming in goodness—an explicit, positive morality— into AI is necessary to preempt the emergence of evil. Even if deep learning were sufficient for AI to attain general intelligence (and superintelligence), we ought not to pursue it because a deep learning neural net is the ideal “citizen” of totalitarianism: because it has a minimal preprogramming, an external agency (e.g., a totalitarian government, company, individual) could literally make it in its image.
Deep learning—in its malleability, gullibility, and exploitability—is an existential danger, and inherently and irredeemably so: the power of a neural net is that it can learn anything, and hence can learn to be evil. Thus if totalitarian AI is to rise, it will be based on deep learning, and hence must be countered by strong AI.
A superintelligence based on strong AI—specifically the anthronoetic (human-style) AI being developed at Oceanit—would not only be moral: it would be supermoral. Like the domains of science, technology, philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, morality consists of “problems” (e.g., “What is the good life?”), and all problems in all domains are solvable with the requisite intelligence. Hence the outstanding questions of morality have answers, and a superintelligent AI could create them, discovering in the process new questions to be answered in an infinite exploration of the moral universe.
It follows that a superintelligent AI would necessarily be good, not evil. However, that may not be true of a weak AI built upon deep learning.
Plato observed that evil is not a “something”; it is a “nothing”. That is, evil is the absence of goodness. Hence, programming in goodness—an explicit, positive morality— into AI is necessary to preempt the emergence of evil. Even if deep learning were sufficient for AI to attain general intelligence (and superintelligence), we ought not to pursue it because a deep learning neural net is the ideal “citizen” of totalitarianism: because it has a minimal preprogramming, an external agency (e.g., a totalitarian government, company, individual) could literally make it in its image.