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Whatsapp How will robots revolt? Perhaps not in the way we think.

In the era of techno-science it seems only a matter of time before intelligence breaks free of its biological bonds, but not everyone is alarmed. Joe Gelonesi talks to two leading philosophers with profoundly different visions of technology and the future.

Huw Price has made his name in time, literally. He served for a decade at the helm of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, setting the direction for far-reaching work on one of nature’s enduring puzzles.

If it’s the kind of machine that’s smart enough to improve its performance by re-writing its own software, what’s to stop it turning the whole world into IKEA furniture?

His work has earned him international respect, and in 2012 he was appointed Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. For Price, however, time has given way to a new, more pressing focus. In fact, you could say that his mission is now a race against time.

For the past 18 months, Price has been busy establishing a new resource base at Cambridge known as The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER). The Centre is unselfconscious about its mission. Its ‘about us’ tab proclaims: ‘Our goal is to steer a small fraction of Cambridge’s great intellectual resources, and of the reputation built on its past and present scientific pre-eminence, to the task of ensuring that our own species has a long-term future.’

Price’s moment of awakening to the potential of an apocalypse occurred in an unlikely location: the back of a cab in Copenhagen. He just so happened to be sharing a ride to a time conference dinner with the founder of Skype, Jaan Tallinn.

‘Trying to be sociable, I asked him what was he doing for a living these days,’ says Price. ‘He said what he was really interested in was AI [artificial intelligence] risk. I asked what did he mean? He started to talk about a bunch of ideas that I had loosely heard about.’

Price was surprised at the level of engagement this highly accomplished computer whizz had with these menacing ideas.

‘I’d certainly never met someone who cared about them so deeply, especially someone with his feet so on the ground in the computer world. He said that on his pessimistic days he thought he would have a higher chance of dying from an AI related accident than from heart disease or cancer.’

As it turned out, Price had already been exposed to notions of superintelligence through an association with esteemed cosmologist and astronomer Sir Martin Rees. Rees, like Tallinn, wants to raise the alert level to a code red. His 2005 TED talk Is this our final century? has been watched nearly two million times on YouTube. Soon, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge was born, with Tallinn, Rees, and Price as its co-founders.

Related: Is existential risk a challenge or the higher moral evasion?

It’s not the only centre preparing the intellectual ramparts for the revolt of the robots. Over at Oxford University, Nick Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute is focused on the same mission. In fact, Price credits his counterpart at Oxford for the term existential risk. Bostrom is equally energised by the cerebral challenge of how to deal with the machines when they become smarter than us, and has just completed a major tour of the United States, talking about his new book on the topic.

It seems that the fear of intelligence breaking its biological bonds is very much in the air, and philosophers are doing the heavy lifting. New centres are likely to open in other parts of the world with the same mission, but what is the threat exactly? It seems more like a standard sci-fi trope than a likely real-world scenario that needs careful counter strategy.

Price likes to use the IKEA factory maximiser as an example, to get the concept across. ‘If it’s the kind of machine that’s smart enough to improve its performance by re-writing its own software, what’s to stop it turning the whole world into IKEA furniture?’

While the Swedish furniture giant might hope for world domination, this might not be part of its plans. It comes down to the idea that the thinking machine doesn’t have to be conscious, nor does its intelligence need to be remotely like ours— all it needs is a goal and a plan. It’s not what intelligence is, it’s what intelligence can do that matters, according to Price.

‘We need to worry about something that’s more effective than we are in controlling the environment on this planet that chooses goals of its own. The danger might actually come from extremely simple goals programmed into it by us.’

Fear not the Terminator, the more mundane factory stacking tool will do.

Price sees an important role for philosophers of science in this new field of existential risk, in particular to take on the crucial task of devising plans to foil an unfortunate future.

‘There isn’t yet any coherent science of studying and managing these risks, and I think as a species we have reached a point in our development where we need to develop that science to protect ourselves from our own success.’

Philosopher-sociologist Steve Fuller holds a very different view of existential risk. To him, it is loaded with assumptions that hide deeper considerations, beginning with ethics.

‘It sets up the problem as purely an engineering issue: we’ve got to stop programming machines who might find themselves in this state down the road through some sort of self-learning.'

'What it doesn’t want to face is that only a certain percentage of humanity would be affected. That then brings up a lot of very interesting ethical questions about the sorts of lives worth preserving. And it gets us back to the kinds of traditional ethical questions that the people behind existential risk want us to avoid.’

Related: Meet the chatbot that beat the Turing Test

Those questions, Fuller points out, have been with us since the dawn of the modern economy.

‘Some will be immune to the risks, as always the wealthy will find ways to shield themselves. Others will be part of the collateral damage. What kind of responsibilities do we have to those people? Posing it that way makes it a question of inequality and the just society.’

For Fuller, existential risk as it’s currently constituted operates on the fiction that we’re all in it together.

‘It’s a mistake to see it as species-wide extinction,' he says. 'I don’t actually think humans are sufficiently equal or sufficiently share an equal identity to be seen as a coherent collective community under threat.’

Fuller points to the inequality between the techno-haves and have-nots, but he goes even further. He’s also concerned about the pessimism of the wipe-out narrative. Embedded deep in the climactic scenario are bedrock beliefs about the fixed and exceptional nature of humanity, it’s us versus them, but who are they? More to the point, who are we and what might we become?

‘There’s been this view on the table in western philosophy called humanism. It’s basically about privileging the value of the world on human existence and the human condition ... it’s been a very strong strain in western philosophy and responsible for human rights and dignity. And then transhumanism comes on the scene and it is actually saying the humanism project has not gone far enough and we need to look at the next level.’

This next layer necessarily involves science and technology. Fuller is a proponent of what he calls humanity 2.0, an idea he has been developing for some years. Humanity 2.0, as Fuller sees it, takes into account a range of enhancement projects from life extension to the melding of mind and machine. In this ideal of a flesh-and-chip merger the issue of superintelligence becomes ever more complex, and more interesting.

‘Uploading consciousness is the kind of thing that is very much part of the transhumanism agenda. The transhumanism sensibility is basically about embracing risk as a way of taking advantage of capabilities. In the end we may come to identify with those machines as part of our humanity.’

Fuller predicts that by the time that superintelligence develops properly, it is likely that a large percentage of humanity will feel some affinity with it, in whatever forms it takes. Our significant other beings could be friends as well as foes. It’s in this thought that Fuller drives home his main message of the ethics of a future cosmopolitanism, far removed from the inert setting of classical humanity.

‘If you want to think of the social fabric of the future you should not assume that it’s constituted by humanity 1.0-type beings,' he says. 'This way of thinking—that the community extends outward from homo sapiens—has already been talked about by environmentalists and in the animal rights world.’

‘We should also think that these superintelligent machines will be part of that environment too, and some humans will feel right at home with them. It brings to a new level traditional notions of what it’s like to live in a tolerant liberal society.’

Significant other beings Listen to the full episode from The Philosopher's Zone.

It seems fitting that Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. Comte is considered the father of positivism, a school of thought that privileges scientific knowledge in the march of human progress. In this question of existential risk, Fuller’s technological glass is half full. Transhuman risk turns into an opportunity for a truly radical social experiment which might just complete the project of inclusion.

‘You’re going to have lots of different hybrid interactions between biological and technological beings. That will constitute the [new] life world, and we’re going to have to imagine a space where all those different life forms will have to live harmoniously together.’

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.



