A.I.: A Pandora’s Box
A recent article on the website of NBC news asked, “Are you still smarter than an AI?” I would argue that this is the wrong question to be asked. It is akin to asking: Does your memory contain more information than an encyclopedia (the size of the interwebs)?
The framing of the question represents the fundamental difference between quantity and quality. It is like having vast wealth and squandering it. The amount is irrelevant if the effect is not to make human beings more productive, to have higher quality lives (not necessarily more leisurely and slothful lives), and to make us better individuals.
Knowledge and information, no matter how vast, are indifferent to morality and right(eous)ness. Ludwig Wittgenstein opined about the nature of ethics and the verifiability of ethical knowledge:
Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that you also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose you wrote all you knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. [See “Big Book” Thought Experiment.]
Morality is an individual trait, which comes in the application of knowledge and information. It is entirely possible to establish a factual scenario, in which some individual or group of persons can be made incrementally better off (in the short term) by harm to (or the entire elimination of) some collection of “others.” This is the basis for Utilitarianism, and it is the immoral and inescapable conclusion of Collectivism. A forced taking from another, whether the taking of property or his very life, for the benefit of the taker, cannot be made “moral” regardless of how it might be “rationalized.” Even in the computer age, throwing a virgin in a volcano is not going to quell the wrath of the gods against immoral persons and peoples.
The greater the expanse of knowledge or access to information the more challenging it is to be “moral” beings. In warning Adam and Eve not to partake from the “forbidden tree,” God was not merely putting forth a dare or challenge. Instead, the warning was in recognition that with great knowledge comes great responsibility and the burden of being moral. There is some truth in the adage, “Ignorance is bliss.” The certain “death,” which results from the eating of the fruit (i.e. from the accumulation of knowledge), is the death of innocence. [See “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” — Genesis 2.]
If we expect AI or technology in any form to make our lives effortless, then what would be the purpose of our lives. If we expect IT to excuse us from being moral beings or to relieve us from the adverse consequences of bad decisions and poor choices, we are racing quickly toward our self-destruction. Are we emotionally prepared to know the unknown? [See Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”] Are we sufficiently adept morally to apply the resulting information, knowledge, and intelligence so that their application makes us more productive rather than individually and collectively more (self-)destructive?
We are all too eager to open a digital Pandora’s Box. My fear is that, in substituting digital “intelligence” for our own moral judgment, we lose the most important part of what makes us Human(e) Beings. Should that happen, it is likely that no “hope” would remain.
