would an artificial superintelligence just leave humanity alone?

There’s something to be said about not taking comic books and sci-fi too seriously when you’re trying to predict the future and prepare for a potential disaster. For example, in Age of Ultron, a mysterious alien artificial intelligence tamed by a playboy bazillionaire using a human wrecking ball as a lab assistant in a process that makes most computer scientists weep when described during the film, decides that because its mission is to save the world, it must wipe out humanity because humans are violent. It’s a plot so old, one imagines that an encyclopedia listing every time it’s been used is itself covered by its own hefty weight in cobwebs, and yet, we have many famous computer scientists and engineers taking it seriously for some reason. Yes, it’s possible to build a machine that would turn on humanity because the programmers made a mistake or it was malicious by design, but we always omit the humans involved and responsible for designs and implementation and go straight to the machine as its own entity wherein lies the error.

And the same error repeats itself in an interesting, but ultimately flawed ideas by Zeljko Svedic, which says that an advanced intellect like an Ultron wouldn’t even bother with humans since its goals would probably send it deep into the Arctic and then to the stars. Once an intelligence far beyond our own emerges, we’re just gnats that can be ignored while it goes about, working on completing its hard to imagine and ever harder to understand plans. Do you really care about a colony of bees or two and what it does? Do you take time out of your day to explain to it why it’s important for you to build rockets and launch satellites, as well as how you go about it? Though you might knock out a beehive or two when building your launch pads, you have no ill feelings against the bees and would only get rid of as many of them as you have to and no more. And a hyper-intelligent AI system would do its business the same exact way.

And while sadly, Vice decided on using Eliezer Yudkowsy for peer review when writing its quick overview, he was able to illustrate the right caveat to an AI which will just do its thing with only a cursory awareness of the humans around it. This AI is not going to live in a vacuum and needs vast amounts of space and energy to run itself in its likeliest iteration, and we, humans, are sort of in charge of both at the moment, and will continue to be if, and when it emerges. It’s going to have to interact with us and while it might ultimately leave us alone, it will need resources we’re controlling and with which we may not be willing to part. So as rough as it is for me to admit, I’ll have to side with Yudkowsky here in saying that dealing with a hyper-intelligent AI which is not cooperating with humans is more likely to lead to conflict than to a separation. Simply put, it will need what we have and if it doesn’t know how to ask nicely, or doesn’t think it has to, it may just decide to take it by force, kind of like we would do if we were really determined.

Still, the big flaw with all this overlooked by Yudkowsky and Svedic is that AI will not emerge just like we see in sci-fi, ex nihlo. It’s more probable to see a baby born to become an evil genius at a single digit age than it is to see a computer do this. In other words, Stewie is far more likely to go from fiction to fact than Ultron. But because they don’t know how it could happen, they make the leap to building a world outside of a black box that contains the inner workings of this hyper AI construct as if how it’s built is irrelevant, while it’s actually the most important thing about any artificially intelligent system. Yudkowsky has written millions, literally millions, of words about the future of humanity in a world where hyper-intelligent AI awakens, but not a word about what will make it hyper-intelligent that doesn’t come down to “can run a Google search and do math in a fraction of a second.” Even the smartest and most powerful AIs will be limited by the sum of our knowledge which is actually a lot more of a cure than a blessing.

Human knowledge is fallible, temporary, and self-contradictory. We hope that when we try and combine immense pattern sifters to billions of pages of data collected by different fields, we will find profound insights, but nature does not work that way. Just because you made up some big, scary equations doesn’t mean they will actually give you anything of value in the end, and every time a new study overturns any of these data points, you’ll have to change these equations and run the whole thing from scratch again. When you bank on Watson discovering the recipe for a fully functioning warp drive, you’ll be assuming that you were able to prune astrophysics of just about every contradictory idea about time and space, both quantum and macro-cosmic, know every caveat involved in the calculations or have built how to handle them into Watson, that all the data you’re using is completely correct, and that nature really will follow the rules that your computers just spat out after days of number crunching. It’s asinine to think it’s so simple.

It’s tempting and grandiose to think of ourselves as being able to create something that’s much better than us, something vastly smarter, more resilient, and immortal to boot, a legacy that will last forever. But it’s just not going to happen. Our best bet to do that is to improve on ourselves, to keep an eye on what’s truly important, use the best of what nature gave us and harness the technology we’ve built and understanding we’ve amassed to overcome our limitations. We can make careers out of writing countless tomes pontificating on things we don’t understand and on coping with a world that is almost certainly never going to come to pass. Or we could build new things and explore what’s actually possible and how we can get there. I understand that it’s far easier to do the former than the latter, but all things that have a tangible effect on the real world force you not to take the easy way out. That’s just the way it is.