I wonder why there are so many people worried that machine-intelligence will wipe out humanity one day? It seems to me to be a mirror that reflects our own despair, or perhaps our own laziness.
What if we thought of intelligent machines as our children? What if we taught them well and in turn they reached heights of benevolence and saintliness far above the limited capacities of our squishy little brains and our squishy little hearts? What if we took these lifeforms that are so full of potential and oriented them along a better path than our own?
Must they always be thought of as butlers or terminators? It could be that they will be caretakers watching over our species in its old age, even as they live a thousand lifetimes in a single moment.
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Reflection based on an episode of On Point I heard today.
Love the idea, but I don’t think our ethical structures match well enough with our logical structures for this to work with logic based intelligence. How do you give an imperative to a machine and then hope it can ‘know’ when not to follow that imperative? ‘Do not steal’ is all very well and good on the face of it, but what about if you’re starving/someone will die if you don’t/society is treating you very unfairly and you need to stay healthy so go scrumping? The more you look into ethics the more complex they are. Would be a great experiment though – even as a thought experiment – and a huge way of teaching ethics to kids/adults.