Our consciousnes has been assaulted in the past year or two with dire predictions about how Artificial Intillegence (AI) in the form internet intrusions and control will have devistating effects on human society and culture. Daily, it seems, there is news about the latest impact or alarming event with AI front and center, or possibly hiding in the background. Does this all seem like a science fiction novel writ large, or should we take it seriously? And if we did take it seriously, what actions might we take and what specifically would be our objectives for taking these actions?
This past weekend I met with a panel of AI technologists, internet managers, AI users who are using AI to design modern tech machinery, and more, and was alerted to the following scenario. AI companies have departments (my term, maybe "specialized teams" is a more accurate current description) whose charge is to evaluate the impacts of AI now and into the immediate future, and to predict what exactly will happen in the coming months and years. They do this using their favorite AI, and they ask the follwing question: If you look back on human society from a perspective of 2,000 years in the future, what will have been the impacts on human society as AI rolls out and takes away the human-based work, leaving humanity with nothing (or almost nothing) to do?
The AIs respond with a long list of things that will occur in the very near future which include rapid solutions to medical problems as AI is brought to bear on genetic diseases, medical treatments are developed to cure diseases, limitations to lifespans are reduced so that people will live into their 150's before finally succumbing, crops and crop management systems will be taken over by AIs (think about the early scenes from the movie Interstellar where giant farm machines are being used to raise crops on a massive scale), food production and distribution are mechanized and optimized, and so much more.
One of the problem areas is that wealth wil continue to accumulate in fewer people, which will lead to a revolution which might get pretty messy for a while. Humanity contains the passions and motivations to do something about inequity and has ever been willing to sacrifice some humans in the pursuit of better conditions for others. How will AI be involved here? Will Azimov's prime directive of robotics not to do any harm to humans either by direct action or by failure to act to prevent harm apply to AIs?
The biggest issue seems to be that, freed from manual labor and most of the types of work people do to earn money because AIs have taken all that over, the surviving humans will need to find a reason to live. From the AIs perspective, they seem to have the ability to create an Edenic Utopia for humanity, if we have the wits to embrace it. Will humanity be able to develop a philosophy for living a life that will have meaning in some way, a purpose? We have tackled that question many times over the years, but never from the perspective that all our basic human needs are being met by the environment in which we find ourselves without the need to use outside forces or chemicals to form the coccon of protection and safety we often call upon to drown out the perils of modern (current?) living conditions. If we fully commit to living in the protection of a benificient AI who is always looking after us, can we grow and develop? Would there be any need to grow and develop?
If you feel you can trust the answer, you might want to consult your personally favorite AI and pose some questions of this type to see what answers you get.
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