Open International Online Debate

Is artificial intelligence (AI) dangerous?

BK TESLA INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, ART AND INVENTION

Alfa BK University, Belgrade

The Utstein Template helpful to Q&A and conceptualizing coalescence of public health, disaster management and philosophy

My given 3 minutes and a few seconds more.

Let me start my 3 minutes by stating my belief that existential questions in the age of knowledge will not be solved, cannot be solved by Artificial Intelligence neither will they be solved by limited enquiry within a box of strict empiricism. We need the tools provided by classical philosophy aided by greater knowledge of the brain. Even the greatest mind cannot completely understand our infinitely complex world. To think that AI can, is perhaps man’s greatest imaginary achievement. Should society permit AI to be coupled with nuclear weapons, let’s heed the sound advice given by an expert; don’t give the Nuclear Codes to AI! 

We live in a world of enormous beauty and of depleted empathy. The dire predicament of our existence and the scientifically extrapolated horrors to come, together with already witnessed outcomes from Hiroshima to Chernobyl to Fukushima and forest fires and city flooding, may give momentum to the use of as yet disregarded classical philosophy in all problem-solution space. We live in a world that can benefit from AI.

International organizations committed to improving the state of the world are falling short while humanity suffers from what I call social dementia and  what  Günther Anders calls apocalypse-blindness. It is within this framework that I approach the posed question for debate: Is artificial intelligence (AI) dangerous? I make my start by asking a] does AI like mankind have ambition, does it have evil intent to harm artificial intelligentsia and b] where do the engrams of denial and the apocalypse-blind spot reside in the cortex? On the other side of the coin is a question of whether our perception of the magnitude and horror of these threats place them beyond our mind’s grasp and if with the help of Al we can bring them into better focus? We can provide no more powerful sentiment than in the words of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955 on nuclear disarmament: “remember your humanity, and forget the rest”; words more relevant than ever and with respect to Al, words lost in scholasticism and social dementia or dolthood and brainrot.

My answer to the question being debated is provided by one flavor of Greek coffee called Yes and No, and relates to the amount of sugar added according to taste, somewhat sweet(for one drinker)-somewhat bitter(for another), which is known only to the coffee maker and where sweet is dangerous as in diabetes. In folklore, coffee is made by a prospective bride for the-would-be-groom and it can become a measure of the emanating chemistry between the-would-be-couple. Bridge technology during the Industrial Revolution connected regions much more quickly than the horse and carriage. Bridges could be toppled by winds whose forces were not taken into account in design.

Let me say first and foremost that it is foolish to think that we have our technologies firmly under control and remind ourselves of a saying of Norbert Wiener the father of Cybernetics, the future will not be a comfortable hammock in which we will be waited upon by our robot slaves. The word Cybernetics was first used by Plato relevant to the governance of people, while Ampere used it to denote the science of civil government. I think of it as a guide to restore disrupted equilibrium. Communication, control and feedback are important functions within AI. However, a general purpose robot supported by nth Generation AI is no competitor with the sensory excellence of a wine taster, an orchestral conductor, the visual system’s cognitive contour generator or the frog’s flycatcher. Where they are well-matched, is in picking out the lucky ticket in a gigantic raffle.

Coming from public health I consider it worthwhile to ask what benefit would result if we could quarantine AI here and now and how can we better our understanding of the benefits and risks to AI in the free market? Being the Honorary President of the World Philosophical Forum in the dying seconds of my allocated 3 minutes I make the following suggestion that a philosophical platform be erected for the purpose of monitoring of AI development and its evaluation with adequate emphasis place on its potential and registered misappropriation. I add that with appropriate support the World Philosophical Forum, Athens can launch such a project. Let me end though with a provocative and repeated question; what will happen if AI develops ambition?