Copying Isn't Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is being advertised as the next existential threat to mankind.  The press jumps on doomsday scenarios to grab our attention, but this is old news.  "The end is nigh" goes back at least as far as a predicted biblical apocalypse, and has always been a big seller on the religious circuit.  The alarm is no more worrying than it was in Jesus's time. 

Artificial Intelligence, as we know it, is a way of mimicking human thinking that is based on data collection.  Data has no life of its own, but is a collection of information. Communal data was probably first assembled by tax collectors, and that information was used to decide how much citizens should give to their governments. The pharaoh was less interested in how many people were in his kingdom than in how much money they could bring him.

We are in the infancy of learning how human intelligence works, how it is created, nourished, augmented, diminished, passed on, damaged, and diverted. This is in line with how little we know about our bodies. Why do some people get diseases and others not?  Do we know how much is nature and how much is nurture?  In their prescriptions for health, doctors have followed assumptions that are based on perceived communal knowledge, which turns out to be wrong as much as it is right. Using leeches to draw out bad blood, drilling holes in skulls to relieve headaches, or administering shock therapy to disrupt anomalous behavioural patterns are treatments that have all but been abandoned.  Their foundational data was limited and selective.  Those who collected and interpreted it, had motives to skew the conclusions.  Back then, we were mostly ignorant of the body's processes, but though we may now boast about our advances, we have still not come far down the road. We can talk about nerves, synapses, and electrical impulses, but who really knows how a memory, a signal, or an image is transferred through material that is like the goopy white of an egg?

Compared to the capacity of the brain, our present technology doesn't have the resources to store and compute the amount of memory and experience that exists in a single human body.  A computer and a brain can both process information, but most humans are better than computers in some ways and worse in others.  While it might take a computer a long time to calculate the galaxy of options and possibilities of a single body movement, a human can do it in a split second and does so countless times every day. Apart from a storage capacity problem, the collecting methods and processing parameters for data aren't good at leaving room for human bias in the heart of the machine.  Like computers, people decide things based on what they know and what they have learned, but humans are endowed with the wildcard of emotion.  A computer can't be angry, sad, or happy.  Human decisions are made using not only data and experience, but every other tool in the homo sapiens kit, much of which a computer doesn't have access to.  

A computer can learn that there is a threat to its resources and take evasive action, but this is no more intelligent than a car giving a warning signal when it is low on fuel.  There is no emotion on the part of the car.  In "2001: A Space Odyssey", the computer Hal objects to being unplugged and disabled.  In the story, he can do nothing but threaten.  This is a reassuring scenario, but Arthur Clarke could also have made Hal kill the human who wants to unplug him.  Hal has already managed to kill the crew and send the second astronaut off into space. In the film, there is a tiny but gigantic leap Hal can't make - the ability to see into a human's brain to guess their motives and planned actions.  He only discovered the plot against him by reading lips. Artificial intelligence will be dangerous to humans when computers are able to look inside our brains and know what we are thinking.  This is a bridge we should never cross. If Hal had been able to read minds, he would never have allowed parts of his brain to be disconnected. A computer can make guesses about us, recommend shopping choices based on what we have shown interest in, but it will never understand entirely why a person buys a certain jacket beyond attributes like colour, comfort, and price.  Algorithms can't know that the jacket reminds the potential buyer of a similar one they once had, or be like the jacket of an admired friend, or conform to the image of themselves they have created in their own mind. Some shopping apps let buyers virtually try on garments, but this is no different than playing with dress-up cutout dolls. It lacks the psychological and emotional input for what we ultimately choose.  

Artificial intelligence can do many good things for humans, but its information-gathering skills can also be abused. Like a knife, it can be used for good or bad. With the arrival of surrealism, television, and computers, people became more attuned to the difference between reality and artificiality.  Dramas are artificial creations; the news is supposedly real, though, using the surrealist argument, whatever we see on our screens is an image and is not the real thing. A century ago, René Magritte made the point with his painting of a pipe, whose correct title isn't This Is Not A Pipe, but "The Treachery of Images."

Nobody believes they are seeing the real world when they look through virtual reality glasses, but if we destroy our planet and are unable to venture outdoors except with cameras and drones, we will lose touch with reality.  We will be comfortable in this second-hand world, being fed images that are easy to manipulate.  We won't be able to smell the poisonous air through a drone image or taste the bitter wind.  These nightmares aside, we should only be alarmed when artificial intelligence takes a step away from the artificial and tries to get inside the human brain.  

We need to be on the lookout for what until now have only been science fiction scenarios, where computers can download the contents of our brains.  In the film Total Recall, based on a story called "We Can Remember It For You," citizens can have false memories implanted in their brains, which creates the idea of having been somewhere or done something. Clients wake up believing they have lived through their wildest fantasies with no risk to their physical bodies.  We are easily lulled into thinking the next great product will revolutionize our lives and give meaning to our pointless existence, but in our rush to fill that void, we don't always think through the implications and possible eventual abuses.  Our technological advances are amazing achievements, but we need guardrails on how technologies are used. 

When cloning became possible, it was seen as a potential threat to existence, and it caused UNESCO and the WHO to ban human cloning. Some may believe this moratorium is holding up potential research, but many science fiction works have warned us about the unexpected implications of the wholesale production of organs.  We don't yet know all of the fields that AI can be turned loose in, and its power is growing exponentially, but we need to listen to the voices that remind us of mankind's worst tendencies and how easily ambition and the lure of profit can sweep aside common sense.