AI successionism is the growing movement that sees artificial intelligence as humanity’s rightful successor. An entrepreneur Daniel Faggella says that the “moral aim” of advanced AI should be to create a form of intelligence so powerful and wise that “you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.” To most people, hearing that, it sounds insane. But this is not some fringe internet fantasy.
Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, believes in what he calls “digital life” — the idea that AI was the natural next step in evolution. He speaks about it with an almost religious fervor, describing a future in which humans would merge with powerful AI systems or gracefully step aside for their digital successors. He calls those who are worried about AI causing human extinction, “specieists.” To Page, favoring human intelligence over machine intelligence was as arbitrary as favoring one race over another. Intelligence was intelligence, consciousness was consciousness. Who cares what substrate it ran on?
If you live in San Francisco and work in AI, discussing ”a posthuman transition” is apparently common. These are people who work at the top AI labs like DeepMind, xAI etc. A lot of people in positions of power and influence actually believe it - people who work for think tanks that directly influence the US government's policy on AI. These are very important players in the story of how AI is going to roll out.
Many people within the AI community express an indifference or even a preference to a world where AIs are making most of the decisions in society rather than humans. One of these people told a journalist at a conference, “Everyone at this conference is so worried about what’s going to happen to humans in the post-AGI world. But frankly I’m more worried: what if the monkeys are still running the show?”
And in this case, the 'monkeys' refers to the humans. He was more concerned that humans would still be in charge of governments, of corporations, of society, because he had this view that AIs in their superintelligent existence were more deserving and more important to preserve a future world for. Another said, “Honestly, Jasmine, I’m a lot more interested in what the AIs are going to do with each other a thousand years from now than I am in what’s going to happen to humans next year.”
The successionists often use an image of the flame and the torch. They talk about the flame of consciousness, the potentially most valuable thing in the universe. Maybe it's very rare in the universe, we don't know. Humanity, they say, is just one torch carrying that flame. And if AI is better at spreading the flame of consciousness across the universe, and can even experience more blissful types of consciousness and higher forms of moral value than we ever could, then they think we should let the AI go ahead and be a worthy successor to humanity.
So it's common to hear AI successionists say that it is desirable for them to succeed us. And it's also inevitable so there's no point resisting it. Some would say that we should merge with AI - let AI figure out how to do the merger and then take it off the leash and let it run the show. Some people say it's fine if humanity is just completely wiped out - these AIs were trained on human text so in some sense, the human spirit lives on through the AI.
This community tends to valorize intelligence a lot. They also tend to talk about it as if it's on a single scale, as if it runs along a single axis. Their thinking is that there is one kind of intelligence - rational intelligence - and you have more of it or you have less of it. And if the AIs have more of it, they're better than us.
When they talk about consciousness, they tend to say, again, in a very hierarchical way, that there are lower and higher forms of consciousness. They'll say that we have a higher form of consciousness than a horseshoe crab so it is great that we exist and not just horseshoe crabs. And so if the AI can have access to higher forms of consciousness than us, we should be happy for that to come into existence, even if we go extinct.
So whether they're using the term intelligence or consciousness, you see this emphasis on the idea that there are higher forms and lower forms. They think they are the select individuals who might make it through that transformation or if they think AI will just wipe us all out, are happy to make that transformation happen even if it drives us all extinct.
No comments:
Post a Comment