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

As the prospect of evil robots started to seem too kitschy to take seriously, a new digital apocalypse was spotted by the existential guardians. This storyline is based not on Frankenstein or the Golem but on the Genie granting us three wishes, the third of which is needed to undo the first two, and on King Midas ruing his ability to turn everything he touched into gold, including his food and his family. The danger, sometimes called the Value Alignment Problem, is that we might give an AI a goal and then helplessly stand by as it relentlessly and literal-mindedly implemented its interpretation of that goal, the rest of our interests be damned. If we gave an AI the goal of maintaining the water level behind a dam, it might flood a town, not caring about the people who drowned. If we gave it the goal of making paper clips, it might turn all the matter in the reachable universe into paper clips, including our possessions and bodies. If we asked it to maximize human happiness, it might implant us all with intravenous dopamine drips, or rewire our brains so we were happiest sitting in jars, or, if it had been trained on the concept of happiness with pictures of smiling faces, tile the galaxy with trillions of nanoscopic pictures of smiley-faces.²⁹

I am not making these up. These are the scenarios that supposedly illustrate the existential threat to the human species of advanced artificial intelligence. They are, fortunately, self-refuting.³⁰ They depend on the premises that (1) humans are so gifted that they can design an omniscient and omnipotent AI, yet so moronic that they would give it control of the universe without testing how it works, and (2) the AI would be so brilliant that it could figure out how to transmute elements and rewire brains, yet so imbecilic that it would wreak havoc based on elementary blunders of misunderstanding. The ability to choose an action that best satisfies conflicting goals is not an add-on to intelligence that engineers might slap themselves in the forehead for forgetting to install; it is intelligence. So is the ability to interpret the intentions of a language user in context. Only in a television comedy like Get Smart does a robot respond to “Grab the waiter” by hefting the maître d’ over his head, or “Kill the light” by pulling out a pistol and shooting it.

When we put aside fantasies like foom, digital megalomania, instant omniscience, and perfect control of every molecule in the universe, artificial intelligence is like any other technology. It is developed incrementally, designed to satisfy multiple conditions, tested before it is implemented, and constantly tweaked for efficacy and safety (chapter 12). As the AI expert Stuart Russell puts it, “No one in civil engineering talks about ‘building bridges that don’t fall down.’ They just call it ‘building bridges.’” Likewise, he notes, AI that is beneficial rather than dangerous is simply AI.³¹

Artificial intelligence, to be sure, poses the more mundane challenge of what to do about the people whose jobs are eliminated by automation. But the jobs won’t be eliminated that quickly. The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”³² Driving a car is an easier engineering problem than unloading a dishwasher, running an errand, or changing a diaper, and at the time of this writing we’re still not ready to loose self-driving cars on city streets.³³ Until the day when battalions of robots are inoculating children and building schools in the developing world, or for that matter building infrastructure and caring for the aged in ours, there will be plenty of work to be done. The same kind of ingenuity that has been applied to the design of software and robots could be applied to the design of government and private-sector policies that match idle hands with undone work.³⁴

If not robots, then what about hackers? We all know the stereotypes: Bulgarian teenagers, young men wearing flip-flops and drinking Red Bull, and, as Donald Trump put it in a 2016 presidential debate, “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” According to a common line of thinking, as technology advances, the destructive power available to an individual will multiply. It’s only a matter of time before a single nerd or terrorist builds a nuclear bomb in his garage, or genetically engineers a plague virus, or takes down the Internet. And with the modern world so dependent on technology, an outage could bring on panic, starvation, and anarchy. In 2002 Martin Rees publicly offered the bet that “by 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.”³⁵