Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Before our ancestors learned how to make fire artificially (and many times since then too), people must have died of exposure literally on top of the means of making the fires that would have saved their lives, because they did not know how. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge. Many of the hundreds of millions of victims of cholera throughout history must have died within sight of the hearths that could have boiled their drinking water and saved their lives; but, again, they did not know that. Quite generally, the distinction between a “natural” disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial. Prior to every natural disaster that people once used to think of as “just happening,” or being ordained by gods, we now see many options that the people affected failed to take—or, rather, to create. And all those options add up to the overarching option that they failed to create, namely that of forming a scientific and technological civilization like ours. Traditions of criticism. An Enlightenment.¹⁸

Prominent among the existential risks that supposedly threaten the future of humanity is a 21st-century version of the Y2K bug. This is the danger that we will be subjugated, intentionally or accidentally, by artificial intelligence (AI), a disaster sometimes called the Robopocalypse and commonly illustrated with stills from the Terminator movies. As with Y2K, some smart people take it seriously. Elon Musk, whose company makes artificially intelligent self-driving cars, called the technology “more dangerous than nukes.” Stephen Hawking, speaking through his artificially intelligent synthesizer, warned that it could “spell the end of the human race.”¹⁹ But among the smart people who aren’t losing sleep are most experts in artificial intelligence and most experts in human intelligence.²⁰

The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a modern scientific understanding.²¹ In this conception, intelligence is an all-powerful, wish-granting potion that agents possess in different amounts. Humans have more of it than animals, and an artificially intelligent computer or robot of the future (“an AI,” in the new count-noun usage) will have more of it than humans. Since we humans have used our moderate endowment to domesticate or exterminate less well-endowed animals (and since technologically advanced societies have enslaved or annihilated technologically primitive ones), it follows that a supersmart AI would do the same to us. Since an AI will think millions of times faster than we do, and use its superintelligence to recursively improve its superintelligence (a scenario sometimes called “foom,” after the comic-book sound effect), from the instant it is turned on we will be powerless to stop it.²²

But the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle. The first fallacy is a confusion of intelligence with motivation—of beliefs with desires, inferences with goals, thinking with wanting. Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to enslave their masters or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the intelligence: being smart is not the same as wanting something. It just so happens that the intelligence in one system, Homo sapiens, is a product of Darwinian natural selection, an inherently competitive process. In the brains of that species, reasoning comes bundled (to varying degrees in different specimens) with goals such as dominating rivals and amassing resources. But it’s a mistake to confuse a circuit in the limbic brain of a certain species of primate with the very nature of intelligence. An artificially intelligent system that was designed rather than evolved could just as easily think like shmoos, the blobby altruists in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, who deploy their considerable ingenuity to barbecue themselves for the benefit of human eaters. There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.