How to Prevent AI from Destroying the World

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Isaac Azimov

The Shape of Things to Come

A couple of days ago I went to a candidate forum for the local mayoralty election. One male candidate, one woman. The man was quite upbeat about Saint John’s future. He pointed out that container traffic last year was 240,000 units. This year, they are expecting 1 million. Many of the new container ships cannot make it up the St. Lawrence Seaway. So Saint John is becoming the port of choice—the closest port by rail to the markets in the interior. Three years ago, there were two cranes in the harbour for unloading containers. Now there are six. He also noted that the Canadian government is pushing for more trade with Europe and the world, less overland with the US—and this is bound to increase shipping.

At the same time, there are plans to put in a huge new data centre on the west side of town, promising 1,200 jobs in the new economy.

As the meeting ended, a woman stood up and demanded the microphone. She was adamant in arguing—against the rules of the meeting-- that the data centre must not be allowed. It was going to use too much electricity. It would make our electricity rates go up. She was not mollified by the response that the data centre has promised to install its own power plant. 

Another woman I know is also alarmed about this data centre, and is convinced it will not generate the jobs it claims

Today on the bus, I told another woman of my acquaintance what I had heard about the growth of the harbour. She immediately insisted it was not true, that any new port business would go to Halifax. “It always does. It’s about the money.” Yet Saint John already handles three times the tonnage of Halifax.

I seem to see a pattern: women are negative about the future, even when the facts are suggesting optimism.

Indeed, every women I encounter these days is convinced we are in the End Times. The world is collapsing around us, the antichrist is in command, the tribulations have begun, and our only hope is the rapture and the Second Coming. Or some pagan New Age equivalent of this.

Yet I listen to a podcast featuring Elon Musk. Musk has a pretty good track record of predicting the future. They talk about human lifespan doubling within the next ten years, and this getting us to “escape velocity.” That is, within these extra years, means will likely be found to extend the lifespan further, then further, so that most of us alive today are liable to become almost immortal. There are apparently multiple teams working on reversing aging. And human trials on a lifespan-extending drug start this year.

A former classmate of mine at Queen’s is in this game. He too has been telling me this is coming.

Musk predicts that within three years robot surgeons will be as good as the best human surgeons; within four years they will be available in abundance; within five years they will be much better than any human surgeons. Meanwhile, AI will be developing new drugs and cures at an exponential rate: doing in hours what took decades.

What about a flood of immortal retirees? What about the pension system?

There will be no reason to save for retirement, Musk says, within the next ten years. By that time, there will be universal abundance, radical deflation, and everyone’s needs can be taken care of. “Universal High Income.” We will have the Marxist utopia: everyone will just work on what they find interesting. All work will be a hobby.

And forget about spending huge amounts of money on education. “In 4 or 5 years you can learn anything about anything you want for free.”

So why this extreme disconnect between what is actually happening and what most women think is happening?

I think it is indicative of the female psyche. We are in a time of dramatic change, of change more rapid than the world has ever seen.

For many men, this is exhilarating. Men are adventurers. 

But women are wired to crave security. They will fear and resist any change.

This being so, it is perhaps unwise to put women in positions of leadership. Doing so may slow the general progress.

Will AI Be the End of Us?

As of a couple of years ago, I was not worried about AI. But the fact that Elon Musk is worried makes me worried. Let’s try to think this through.

My fundamental reason not to be worried was, put simply, if some AI system gets out of control, you can always pull the plug. Not necessarily literally, but it seems simple and obvious to build in a kill switch, so that you can cut power if it goes rogue. As AI gets more completely integrated into our lives, this might become more disruptive; but it is still surely fairly straightforward to craft systems that can be shut down incrementally with a minimum of disruption. Built-in redundancy is a standard engineering principle.

Simple-minded of me? What about more subtle matters, like job loss? What about the possibility that humans are made obsolete by AI?

I’ve had that discussion since the advent of desktop computers in the early 1980s. And it has really been going on since the days of Ned Ludd—since the days of Plato. At every new technological advance, people express this same worry. At the advent of the machine age in the 19th century, everyone feared there would be mass unemployment; and wealth would concentrate at the top. It did not happen. People invested the improved productivity in owning more stuff. General wealth expanded, and greater equality of wealth.

This happened again with the advent of computers. And with the advent of the World Wide Web.

So why not with AI?

There is an argument that AI is different: AI replaces the last human bit, the brain overseeing the operation of the machine. When self-driving cars have fewer accidents than mortal drivers, isn’t that the omega point? The machines can run themselves.

What they do still need is any purpose. They need a human to tell them the destination. Without humans, there is no place to go.

This argues that the greatest need in future will be for philosophers, theologians, creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. AI will take over STEM and the professions. But it seems to me a computer cannot address purpose or meaning, any more than science and technology can.

Scott Adams thinks that AI has an absolute limit, and will always need human supervision, because it “hallucinates.” In other words, by its nature, artificial “intelligence” cannot make judgements about reality. Only humans can; human consciousness is a sort of divine spark.

How many jobs will there be for philosophers, creatives, and entrepreneurs? Quite likely, a lot. When the AI and the machines can so easily turn ideas into products, when every individual already owns a printing press, a broadcast network, an AI accountant, an AI lawyer, a 3-D printer, we may again simply move to more employment, greater wealth, and greater equality.

Apocalypse Now?

 

We used to b so hopeful back in the 1960s. This, many of us felt sure, was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Which would be in every way better than the present age.

The mood has darkened significantly.

An interviewee on John Cleese’s Dinosaur Hour made an unsettling point. Increasingly, mankind is developing technologies that could put an end to mankind. We have been living with the threat of nuclear annihilation since the 1950s. We are now close to developing AI to a level at which it might act unpredictably. And then there is genetic manipulation, which might be used to create something rather worse than Covid-19 at almost any moment. A highly virulent, 100% fatal virus seems a possibility.

At the same time, technological improvements make such tools accessible, over time, to more people. 

How long will it take before one such tool is in the hands of a psychopath, the sort of mind that shoots up schools? Someone who wants to die, but also wants to take the whole world with them?

The commentator on the Dinosaur Hour thought it inevitable by the end of this century.

I can’t see, offhand, where his logic is wrong. Other than it is all, as it always was, in the hands of God. Perhaps he planned this for the end times.

This might also explain the frequency of reported alien visits in recent years. Either they are coming to save us, or to watch the fireworks.

The Ghost of Future's Past

 

Had occasion in the course of my teaching to watch a video of the Futurama ride at the GM pavilion, New York Worlds’ Fair, 1964-5. I was there at the time, in 64; I remembered some of it. But this time I was struck by how our attitude towards the future then was so different from today. GM was confident the future would be abundant, thanks to improvements in technology. Progress marches on! Roads through the tropical jungles, bringing goods to market! Submersibles reaping the limitless harvest of the seas! Vast cities of light.

Nowadays, rather than celebrate technology, we fear it as the enemy. Even though technology has indeed brought us many marvels since 1964: the Internet, the smart phone, longer lifespans, abundance of food from the green revolution. So why did we sour on it?

Granted, the GM exhibit might not have been fully representative of all the voices of 1964. Or rather, 1962 or so, when the exhibit was presumably designed. This was big business talking. But the ride was highly popular during the fair, a reprise of one of the most popular pavilions of the 1939 Fair, and did not get any pushback at the time for overplaying the wonders of technology. It seemed to express the broad consensus. Science conquers all.

I have long thought that western civ lost its nerve in the carnage of the First World War. I think of Eliot’s “The Waste-Land” emerging at about that time. Or W.B. Yeats’s discovery that “We are but weasels fighting in a hole.” 

But watching this video, I had another thought. It seems to be our view of technology in particular that has changed. This seems to be the pivot. 

Perhaps the underlying cause, even the cause of WWI in the first place, is what Alvin Toffler called future shock. Since about the second half of the 19th century, and especially with the personal computer revolution beginning circa 1980, things have been changing rapidly due to technology. In effect, none of us lives any longer in the land or in the culture we were born into. This can cause, and perhaps has caused, a general trauma, a sense that we are losing control of our lives. “Stop the world; I want to get off!” Perhaps this is seen in Kipling’s 1897 lines:

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard

Already, to him, technology is the enemy.

Toffler’s “future shock” is based on the known phenomenon of culture shock.

I know a little bit about culture shock. Alarmingly, governments and medical establishments seem not to. I have lived through culture shock more than once. It is no trivial thing. 

For the first little while in a radically new culture, say the first three months, you are on vacation. Everything is new and wonderful. What you feel the most is that all the old constraints of daily life back home are gone. All the weary chains of habit and social convention that we secretly resent are gone, and we want to run naked in the woods. We want to hook up. First of all, nobody knows you, so you need not worry about your reputation. Screw up, and you just take the plane home. And the first impression when faced with new rules is that there are no rules. You can go ahead and just do as you want; as you always wanted.

This crazy optimism somewhat describes, in cultural terms, the Fin de Siecle, the Edwardian period, the period just preceding the First World War. The automobile, the airplane, the moving picture, the phonograph, were rapidly transforming individual lives. In politics, “progressivism” was born: the application of science and technology to society would solve everything.

For another good representation of this state, see Margaret Meade’s “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Any old foreign hand should have seen she was in the first stage of culture shock. But for decades, it was taken as solid anthropological work. Yeah, everyone In Samoa just had sex whenever they wanted. None of our Western hangups.

This is also why “exotic dancer” is a synonym for “erotic dancer”: the nearest foreign country is usually imagined to allow free love. Absurdly, this was the reputation of the Muslim Middle East in the Victorian Era. Those guys with the women in abayas. Even in my youth, the most famous stripper in Montreal went by the name “Fawzia Amir.” 

Ironically, the same culture shock leads young Muslim men coming to northern Europe to think it is okay to rape young local women. After all, here in the “Wicked West,” anything goes.

In England, syphilis was long known euphemistically as the “French pox.” In France, it was called “the English malady.”

And so it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.

An expat can get themself in a lot of trouble during this stage. 

Now imagine a government that welcomes large numbers all at once from a quite different culture. What do you think might happen? But I digress….

But the next stage is worse. After about three months, in the usual course of expat life, you come to the impression that the rules no longer apply both ways. These foreigners have no morals; and they are insane. Nothing here makes sense. And this is not a vacation; you realize you cannot go home again. You are stuck here.

At this point, a large proportion of expats sink into a state of depression, and never recover. They cannot bear to go out in the street. They want to stay in their apartment, the only place they feel safe. Or they begin to haunt the expat bars, where they sit there all evening getting drunk and complaining to other drunken expats about this godforsaken hellhole. Every foreign station has such an expat bar. 

A college I worked in, transported virtually wholesale from Canada, after a few months redesigned the “learning centre” to look like Fort Apache, with the foreign teachers on raised platforms behind high counters. This was all psychological; there was no threat of violence or threat on campus. It was soon all “us” and “them.”

And this may explain the First World War, and the Second. They were nativist outbreaks, nationalist outbreaks of paranoia at how their distinctive culture was threatened by this rapid change.

Similarly, Darwin chronicled in “The Descent of Man” how, whenever European adventurers encountered some primitive people, the primitives seemed to stop working and reproducing. They started to drink heavily, and their numbers rapidly declined. Everyone was experiencing culture shock at once’ everyone was depressed. And for groups like the Canadian “First Nations” or the Australian aborigines, this state of culture shock and depression has continued to this day, for centuries. One might suggest that the same culture shock lingers among American blacks, their ancestors suddenly uprooted from tribal cultures in Africa. That’s how severe culture shock can be, if the cultures are sufficiently different.

Now imagine again what might happen if you rapidly introduce into your country large groups of people from a widely different culture.

A not insignificant proportion of expats undergoing culture shock have a psychotic break. When nothing around you makes sense anymore, almost anything you imagine might seem true. I have experienced this myself briefly once or twice. In some it seems to be more serious, and last longer. And some may act out their fantasies in dangerous ways. There are stories in every expat enclave of how old Tom or Bertha went off, and did something like take all their clothes off in front of the class. Or decide that their daughter was the current incarnation of a Bodhisattva.

And this is what we may be seeing now throughout Western society. Nobody can count on the old verities any more: marriage, children, the female role, the male role; even the accepted meaning of words; even the meaning of such words as pronouns. A growing proportion of us get depressed and want to retreat to some “safe space,” or start acting in destructive ways,  becoming violent; treating neighbours as deadly enemies. A certain proportion take to alcohol and drugs. Others, in fear , retreat to group think, become NPCs, increasingly afraid of any new ideas. A certain proportion imagines that now everything is permitted, “conventional morality” no longer applies, and they can do whatever they want. And almost all of us now sit around complaining about technology and imagine it is destroying the world. It’s causing pollution! It’s using up all available resources, and soon we will starve in the dark! It’s causing climate change! Climate change will soon kill us all!

Rather than being able to manage matters and reassure, those in charge are the most fully culture shocked and hysterical. They are most threatened by the earth moving unpredictably beneath them. Their status depends on the status quo. This explains why governments and big corporations are rapidly getting oppressive and controlling: wanting censorship, wanting to arrest development with more and more regulation, imagining bogeys under every bed.

How do we escape this? Faith.

News of the Future

Death Spiral for Cars.

Mark Steyn on the Future

I disagree with Mark Steyn.

October 21 was Back to the Future day: the day to which Marty McFly and Doc Brown time- travelled in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II. Steyn points out all the many ways in which the future as forecast in the movie is more advanced than the reality we live with, and concludes that Western Civilization is running out of steam. The future, it seems, isn't what it used to be.

Wrong. First off, predictions, expecially by experts, are almost always wrong. This is because the most likely thing is always continuity, but nobody will listen to you or pay you as an expert if you do not predict major change. So the future is always more futuristic in the telescope than through the window. Remember monorails? Flying cars? Personal jet packs?

Given that the experts are wrong, it seems silly indeed to take your predictions from a popular movie. The purpose of this movie is to entertain, not to make accurate predictions. “Jaws 19”—very funny. Making the future as different as possible from the present is obviously the best option for entertainment value. How could anyone take the predictions as serious?

Steyn goes on to argue that, if someone were taken by a time machine from 1890 to 1950, they would be stunned by all the changes. Cars, planes, electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing, radio, maybe TV. But jump them another 60 years to 2010, and thinks would still look pretty much the same as they did in 1950. Cars, planes, electricity, telephones, indoor plumbing, TV.

He's right, but I'd say looks here are deceiving. Historically, the first things we tackled were the big machines, large engines such as are needed for transportation or manufacturing, because those were the easiest things to build. They did not require as much precision. But, being big, they were and remain the most visible.

Since about the 1940s, we have moved on to the small things: printed circuits, transistors, lasers, computers, software, nanotechnology, DNA sequencing, GMOs, and so forth. These are less immediately visible, being small, but they are probably more important. The green revolution is close to eliminating starvation worldwide. GMOs will go further. There is serious talk, at least, of extending lifespans indefinitely. That would be a big change, surely? The Internet and the accessibility of multimedia to everyone will probably be more significant than the invention of the printing press; quite possibly than the invention of writing. 

Videophone, as predicted in France circa 1900.

Last week I went to buy a new phone, and was surprised to discover that I no longer had the option to buy an “ordinary cell phone” of the old Nokia variety. All the phones on offer were smart phones, with touch screens, cameras, massive memories, Internet connections, and apps available of all sorts. But they cost less than the cell phone I bought two years ago. And when I was teaching IT just five years ago, “smart phones” were not even predicted by the text we used. It talked instead of “Personal Digital Assistants.”

When I went to put in my old SIM card, I found it no longer fit. For the new phone, I needed either a micro SIM or a nano SIM. When I brought my old SIM card to the connectivity provider, the clerk laughed to see something so old fashioned. But I was using it in a phone I bought only two years ago!

I agree with Steyn that there are bad signs for the future of Western Civilization. But I don't think technology is where the problem is manifesting.