AI Warning: Utopia or Extinction?

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It’s getting serious. Real serious. Our techie friends with an eye to the future are trembling with fear over the prospects of runaway AI (Artificial Intelligence). Malicious malware could so upset the global economic and cultural system that our planet might never recover.

We’ve just been issued an AI warning. Let’s pause for six months to think this over! Let’s ask our ethicists and policy makers to install guardrails before everthing runs off track!

AI Warning in the “Open Letter”

Along with Elon Musk and countless persons I’ll never meet, I’ve signed the Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. The AI Warning is stark.

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

“Risk the loss of control of our civilization.” Really!

New Book! “Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics” Click here for more on the book.

Our transhumanist friends are willing to take this risk. Transhumanists hope gleefully for the Singularity, the threshold crossing to superintelligence that will replace today’s Homo sapiens with tomorrow’s posthuman species. Transhumanists hopes for a digital utopia. The transhumanist vision includes extinction for us and utopia for our successors.

Religious transhumanists believe that AI enhancement could lead to deepened spirituality and even sanctification. Here we find optimism, enthusiasm, and even utopianism.

Our day-to-day digital geniuses in the lab, much to the contrary, are not naive optimists. Rather, they fear that such a leap to superintelligence risks the “loss of control of our civilization.” This prospect deserves at least a six month shut-down with a think-over.

“Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence”

Long before we cross the singularity threshold into the transhumanist utopia, civilization will succumb to the shere power of AI to manipulate, distort, and devour our worldview. Twenty-six experts have composed an analysis and roadmap, Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence. Digital security is at stake. Prevention of cyberattacks is at stake. The nature of the threats will change constantly. There is reason to expect “attacks enabled by the growing use of AI to be especially effective, finely targeted, difficult to attribute, and likely to exploit vulnerabilities in AI systems.” Therefore, “policymakers should collaborate closely with technical researchers to investigate, prevent, and mitigate potential malicious uses of AI.” That’s the AI warning.

To heed this AI warning, we need not begin at point zero. Good things are already happening. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence lifts up ethical ideals for cyber professionals. AI professionals should “contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing.”

The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights contends that “you should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems.”

And the Brookings Institute recommends that we…

maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
penalize malicious AI behavior and promote cybersecurityThe Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence lifts up ideals for cyber professionals.

AI and Faith

Ted Peters, ed. “AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction.” For more on this book, click here.

Rising to the occasion of the AI warning is the Seattle-based online ogranization, AI and Faith. Sparked by David Brenner, this multi-religious assemblage of computer techies and theologians is monitoring the frontier of innovation. AI and Faith envisions “a world where the effects of technology are exclusively life-affirming, promoting the dignity and wellbeing of all humans and improving their interactions through meaningful community and a just society.”

Musk’s proposed six month think-over might well benefit from input by such an organization dedicated to “meaninful community and a just society.”

Is Artificial Intelligence really intelligent?

Noreen Herzfeld, “The Artifice of Intelligence.” For more on the book, click here.

Is Artificial Intelligence really intelligent? No. It only seems that way. In her TED talk, “Does AI Actually Understand Us?“, Aloyna Fyshe reminds us that AI only appears to be intelligent. It’s not. AI calculates at amazing speed, to be sure. But, there’s no mind akin to a human mind at home there.

My favorite expert in this field is Noreen Herzfeld. Noreen teaches both computer science and theology at St. John’s University in Minnesota. She’s a long time veteran of the interaction between human intelligence and machine intelligence. She’s skeptical that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is even on the horizon.

“While an AGI remains the ultimate goal, most programs that are called AI today remain limited in scope and utilize the strengths of the computer’s speed and memory rather than human-like procedures. For now, while programs that are new and exciting are called AI, a true AI that captures the essence of human intelligence remains elusive” (Herzfeld, 2023, p. 8).

Noreen’s new book hot off the press, The Artifice of Intelligence, is a must read!

Here is the import of what has just been said. Our fears about the future of AI should not focus on superintelligence let alone a posthuman species. Rather, what we should rightly fear is malice. Human malice. Not AI malice.

To put it another way, the problem we must face is not smart AI. Rather, the problem we must face is ourselves. “I fear that AI’s dangers are all too predictable, because the problem with AI is us,” writes Jessica Mesman in The Christian Century.

The power of AI is ripe for harvesting by politicians bent on spreading disinformation and even gerating fake photos, hackers who aim to drain your bank account of its funds, gangsters who hold cities hostage while extorting their budgets, graffitiests who pollute and tarnish otherwise beautiful things, militarists who design autonmous killing robots and drones, and terrorists who recruit new disciples. In short, what we fear is not intelligence but rather sin.

The only way to curb sin and reduce the damage it causes is by enforcing law. Regulatory laws that exhibit justice, civility, and harmony. The European Commission is already formulating a “regulatory framework proposal for Artificial Intelligence.” Musk’s six month think-over would provide time to formulate laws that could help in this curbing of maliciousness.

If we understand the human species as “God’s created co-creator,” we must build into this concept the moral mandate to advance technology for the common good. Yet, human creativity is ambiguous. It’s subject to both beneficence and malificence. Realism requires that we anticipate malificence. That’s what the AI warning entails.

Will AI techies avoid the mistakes of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Der Zauberlehrling), the apprentice invokes a magic that gets out of hand. A disastrous flood portends doom on the sorcerer’s house. Just in the nick of time, the master sorcerer returns and once again regains control over the magic. This prevents destruction. Whew. A close call.

In our present situation, we have received the AI warning. There is no master sorcerer to come to our aid. If AI runs away with our future, there is no repair service to call to fix the matter. Right now, whether we like it or not, our society must face the crisis with knowledge, foresight, and sound judgment.

Conclusion

We’ve received an AI warning. Could the public theologian and the bioethicist along with the conscientious techie help us heed the warning? You betcha!

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Ted Peters recently published an edited volume, AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? For Patheos, Professor Peters posts articles and notices in the field of Public Theology. He is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union. He co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. He is a founding member of AI and Faith. He is now releasing a new volume, The Voice of Public Theology. See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

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