I have been a fan of author and neuroscientist Sam Harris for quite some time now. I enjoy and continue to enjoy his support for atheism and combating religious extremism (in some cases extreme religions). His near-perfect blend of substance and eloquence is a rarity even among rationalists. Recently, he has been weighing in on the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you listen to his relatively recent interview with Joe Rogan, TED talk, and podcast with computer scientist Stuart Russel, for example, you will see that he believes that a future in which AI dominates over humans is virtually inevitable. His main contention is that we should all, starting today itself if not earlier, look at this as a serious issue worth considering how to avoid.

He uses the example of aliens, for instance, sending us a message saying they would be here in 50 years and how humans would likely take something like that far more seriously than AI overtaking human intelligence and capabilities in the same amount of time, as predicted by many. This is a fair point. However, where I disagree with Harris is when he says that one week of AI thinking is equivalent to 20,000 years of human progress. The problem with this argument is that it assumes that human progress is simply a matter of human thought. Philosophically (Sam has a B.A. degree in philosophy, by the way), this is a very “rationalist” idea which originally assumed that we can gain knowledge by reason alone (i.e. without relying on empirical data or experimentation, as it were).

Herein lies the problem. Most scientists are only able to gain small amounts of knowledge (if any) after years upon years of tedious and costly research, which involves building devices or structures (such as the Large Hadron Collider), hiring dozens or hundreds of research assistants and graduate students to crunch the numbers, and simply waiting for nature to take its course. For example, to really know if radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation exposure (e.g. from cell phones) increases risk of certain cancers, we probably have to analyze data gathered over a generation or two. This knowledge is not something that can be merely “thought up” at lightning speeds by an AI algorithm on a hard drive.

Any kind of artificial simulator of human biological processes would also, presumably, face similar bottlenecks of research that examined those actual biological systems on their own timetable. I hope you get my point that there are many other examples such as this which suggest that processing speed (or a human brain on steroids) does not translate directly or linearly to greater intelligence or progress. There’s also that other little thing called “creativity” or “inspiration” which does not seem to have a predictable or methodical approach to it even in the most gifted humans. It is likely closely related to randomness and therefore any progress associated with that is not linear either. This is not to downplay the concerns Sam has about the issue of AI. Such a system need not be godlike or omniscient to be considered a threat to humanity.

However, at the same time, as scientists and rationalists, we should keep our fears and concerns in check for the moment. It is very easy for human beings to fall into “manias” over this or that issue only to fizzle out of it a few years or decades later, simply sweeping under the carpet all the costs and efforts all that worrying entailed. At present, however, my computing devices still never fail to give me problems and or have new problems and issues introduced sometimes, ironically, with upgrades (see one of my previous blog entries). We are still at the stage where, in most cases, all we humans need to do is just sit back and wait for our machines or robots to take a few steps toward us before collapsing for some reason and then requiring hours or weeks of work to get functional again. We simply need to keep our operating systems running for a few weeks or months, if we’re lucky, before some issue will crop up requiring a reboot.

As for hard drives, they almost always fail suddenly and without warning. This is to say nothing of the completely unpredictable behavior of batteries (whether laptop, cell phone or some other device). It’s true these problems may not be as bad in the future but the point is, there are many, many things that get in the way of Harris’ “20,000 years of progress in one week” scenario. That is almost certain never to happen and people, especially governments, should not be made to worry about that. Imagine if those in power were convinced that a cure to cancer (all of them) and diabetes (just Type II, even) would cripple the global economy due to trillions in losses from obsolete lifelong scans, surgeries, medications and nursing care. Millions of jobs would be lost too. We may never see such research getting the funding it needs.