Posted by araucaria
(here)
My latest response to the entity Hanson was carefully worded to leave it open as to whether mechanical posting was the work of a bot performing like a human or a human performing like a robot. The challenge of AI is partly due to the dual nature of the technology, i.e. both bottom up, building increasingly sophisticated hardware, and top down, producing soulless, dumbed-down humanoids, clones, zombies, human pilotless drones, call them what you will – yes, thank you Hanson, Borgs will do just fine.
There is inevitably a gray area where a machine will be mistaken for a human, and vice versa. This gray area is so huge that it more or less covers the entire field. In other words, you have artificial life protected by a human shield, just as any hostage-taking individual or larger group operates behind a human shield. In an ordinary hostage-taking situation, guilt is clear, and it becomes licit to envisage taking the life of one visibly ready to take a life, thereby overriding the desire not to take any life. However, in the situation we are talking about here, there is no such moral dilemma: the problem is entirely about saving the hostage.
Although John Lash has correctly identified the issue as being between life and nonlife forms, his talk of killing, his racism and contempt for lower life forms such as cockroaches shows that he is willing to take the risk of false positives, in other words kill a few hostages. This is an untenable position to hold, not only emotionally, but also logically, because you cannot kill a machine, you can only fry its circuitry – you cannot take life from a lifeless entity. It is literally the madness (shortsightedness) of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It is madness, i.e. totally ineffective, because it is like trying to remove a perceived global threat from computers by blowing up a few targeted government buildings or, since the threat is viral, by taking an axe to perfectly functioning hardware. The hardware per se is not evil and there is nothing to be gained by its removal.
To see how we are going to deal with this huge gray area, we need to understand first what distinguishes life from non-life. Distinguishing the human from the inhuman is not good enough because ‘positive ET’ extends the notion of life beyond human per se. To put it another way, humanity is one local flavor of the universal phenomenon called life (cockroaches being another). This is the explanation for positive ET’s involvement in this whole sorry mess – he, she, all of them are also in the firing line as another protective shield. There is no shortage of life-bearing shields to sacrifice in seeking to eradicate this scourge. I would suggest that multiple global and/or civilization extinction events are not caused directly by this ‘evil force’ so much as by a normal, healthy but totally desperate attempt to shake off this plague once and for all. It has never worked in the past, and this is why: you can blow up hardware on the scale of an entire planet and more, all for nothing in an attempt to remedy a software (offplanet) issue. In this scenario, science and spirituality never meet.
The reason I brought up psychopathy screening as a possible solution is that it covers both extremes of the above-mentioned gray area, and everything in between. What is a psychopath? I would say, a human affected to some degree with this AI virus, as evidenced in things like lack of empathy or introspection, or the lack of creativity. There is no point eradicating humans for their variable inhuman component for, depending on where the boundary is set, we would all be eligible for extermination – which is in fact what we are seeing. But the purpose of screening is not to eradicate anyone or anything: it is to allocate positions to those who are fit for purpose. This includes the work of robots – AI as a non-life form can also be an integral part of life: there is no question of bombing ourselves back to the Stone Age. Machines can also serve, but not as masters. They can be identified and removed from positions of too much power. This amounts to rescinding the Peter Principle whereby "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
I suggest that psychopathy screening is the tool to achieve this because it would identify and quantify the inhuman tendencies (dangerousness) of each entity, irrespective of whether they are human or not, and treat them accordingly. The issue of decidability is circumvented. And the question of rehabilitation/reprogramming would remain open and depend, on a case-by-case basis, on an entity’s ability and/or willingness to adjust.
Re: John Lash's Kalika war party
Reply With Quote
You choose. Or I choose.
I see an emotional reaction based on a misunderstanding. I should have been clearer. Allow me to try again. "Which interpretation do we, as individuals, choose?"
Bookmarks