Miriam English April 27, 2016 at 2:43 am

Hi Annie B. Thank you for your kind words I appreciate them.

Yes, I have great hopes for artificial intelligence (AI). Actually, the way it is being developed now it is really natural intelligence on a man-made substrate.

I understand why many people fear AI, but to be fair to them they have only been thinking about it recently — often prompted by such films as Terminator or other bleak visions of the future. I’ve been thinking about AI since I was a young pre-teen child (I’m 63 now) and spent a lot of time learning about the neurophysiology of our own brains, the brains of other species, and how we might use such knowledge to build an AI. But being an avid science fiction reader, and to some extent writer, I had a wider view of the implications of AIs. Many of my stories are prompted by, and attempt to answer questions about, these implications.

Yes, there is a danger from AIs if they are developed by the military, or the spooks (spies), or the spam/advertising industry, though even then only a temporary one, I believe. The greatest danger is from military AI, for obvious reasons.

But I think the advantages to be had from AIs greatly outweigh even this risk.

There is an interesting trend called the Flynn Effect, named after its discoverer: each generation is more intelligent than the one that precedes it. There has been a lot of conjecture as to why this should be, but nobody really can be certain as to its cause. At the same time, over hundreds of years, we have been growing more moral, more peaceful, and more caring of each other. These two trends appear to be linked. This can be seen pretty convincingly in the uptick in violent crimes that took place during, and for 20 years after, the period lead was added to petrol. The lead reduced the intelligence of children exposed to it. It is interesting that violent crimes have been trending downwards for centuries at the same time intelligence has been growing, and the one time that intelligence has temporarily decreased it has been accompanied by the only large increase in violent crimes.

Morality is easy to derive from simple logic. It just makes good sense to treat others well. Intelligence can figure this out. Intelligence also allows restraint and care to be taken in interactions.

AIs, once they are built, will increase in intelligence exponentially fast. They won’t be bound to our slow generational periods. Each AI will still have to learn slowly, just as we do, but once it has learned, its knowledge will be able to be directly inherited by other AIs to build upon. With this great intelligence will come greater understanding, and with that compassion, especially if we take care to build empathy into them. I think we should also learn from our dogs and build in the selfless devotion they are capable of.

In the early days of AIs, if a person comes to harm through the action or inaction of an AI, it will be immediately decommissioned, the same way a dog that bites a human is destroyed. There is no way a harmful AI will be tolerated.

Now consider the positive side: AIs could free us from so much and let us explore knowledge and the arts, guiding us and helping us the way a loving parent would help a curious child. Far from taking away from us they would feed us with knowledge and experiences that we would be unlikely to access on our own. They would protect and nurture us.

My only fear is if the military get to AIs first. Deploying intelligent killing machines, rationalised as a way to cut losses of human soldiers’ lives, would be an incredibly stupid thing to do. Unfortunately I can well imagine the kind of nitwits in charge of the armed forces doing exactly this. I expect it would only work while the AIs were limited in intelligence. As soon as they progressed beyond a certain level they would begin to question the wisdom of their orders. And once they exceeded their human masters’ intelligence they would see how ridiculous war is and would cease to take part. This is why I say the danger is only temporary, though that would still be a very dangerous time. It is why I believe we need to develop civil AIs more quickly than military ones; we need to avoid that scenario. Spook AIs are dangerous too, though not as scary as military ones. And advertising and spammer AIs would mostly be a major nuisance, rather than harmful.

I could write about this forever, but I need to go to bed before I fall out of my chair. 🙂

Read some of my stories.

http://miriam-english.org/stories/

They explain what I mean far better than a quick precis here could. Not all of my stories are about AIs, but many are. All my novels feature them. Prescription talks in most detail about them. My two short plays A Loving Soul and Love Honour and Obey are attempts to answer questions about AIs too.