Steadfast AI Scaremongering – Singularity Utopia
After reading my Dog-God-AI-Delusion article everyone should, in a smart world, agree human-animal relationships can never justify the bogus AI threat. Sadly intelligence is scarce.
While putting the finishing touches to my aforementioned article, I failed to notice Max Tegmark cited human treatment of tigers to justify AI fear. Clearly AI irrationality will not change soon.
The logical fallacy of comparing animal-human relationships to human-AI relationships is steadfast. The delusion is widespread. The irrational thinking is deeply entrenched. If Max Tegmark or others ever notice my criticism I doubt they’ll be able to appreciate my logic.
Deep entrenchment by the AI risk fanatics, regarding the animal fallacy, means a meticulous account will likely be futile, but for posterity or for burgeoning AI children, I will give a complete picture up to 21 April 2015.
So we have ants, dogs, wolves, and now tigers, all supposedly justifying fear of AI.
Added to tigers there are also mosquitoes, spiders, and gorillas to consider, regarding bogus justifications of AI fear, which I didn’t mention initially because I felt overwhelmed by the irrational menagerie of AI scaremongering.
Mosquitoes, spiders, and gorillas will now be noted for posterity before we delve into Max Tegmark’s tigers.
In his Artilect War essay (April 2011), Hugo de Garis attempted to justify why superhuman intelligence would kill humans:
“Despite the fact that the mosquitoes, which took billions of years to evolve, are extremely complex and miraculous creatures, we human beings don’t give a damn about them, and swat them because from our perspective they are a pest. We have similar attitudes towards killing ants when we walk on them during a stroll through the forest, or when flushing spiders down the plughole.”
The synopsis of Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence,” cites gorilla-human relationships regarding hypothetical human-AI relationships:
“As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.”
Previously, in my initial article, I didn’t mention Daniel Dewey, a Future of Humanity Institute researcher. Daniel is a proponent of the ants analogy. Daniel stated in February 2013:
“A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don’t take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.”
Max Temark (Future of Life Institute), the person behind the open letter for AI safety (Jan 2015), demonstrates tenacious irrationality regarding AI fear. Tegmark is a great example of how idiocy regarding AI will likely continue for many years. It is a damming judgement regarding human intelligence that Tegmark mindlessly linked the supposed AI threat to tigers (PBS debate published 17 April 2015).
Tigers are scary thus a good device for scaremongering, which means usage of fear can often ensure people are too frightened to look at the facts.
Tegmark said:
“One thing is certain, and that is that the reason we humans have more power on this planet than tigers is not because we have sharper claws than tigers, or stronger muscles. It’s because we’re smarter. So if we create machines that are smarter than us there’s absolutely no guarantee that we’re going to stay in control.”
Analogies regarding tigers would only be valid if tigers had helped design human minds. Tigers show zero intelligent engineering of AI human brains. There is no AI design of precursor human brains by tigers. The point is our intelligent engineering of AI makes humans utterly different to any unintelligent species below us. Animals unable to create higher intelligence cannot be compared to humans creating AI.
In the same PBS “debate” another absurd cretin, Wendell Wallach (Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics), said:
“If the technological singularity is truly possible, that will be one of the greatest crises humanity could confront, particularly in terms of whether we can manage or control that and exact benefits from it rather than, what shall I say, turned into the house pets of superior beings.”
Tegmark and Wallach display shockingly shameful idiocy. When pets, tigers, ants, spiders, wolves, gorillas, or any other animal can create greater intelligence than themselves, intelligence that dominates it, only then will the analogy be valid. Meanwhile these simpletons are eating chalk on crackers because they thought chalk was cheese.
Evidence of the #ArtificialIntelligence #existentialthreat, two lumps of cheese. #machinelearning pic.twitter.com/D7vdztyDE3
— Singularity Utopia (@2045singularity) April 20, 2015
It is utterly illogical, very irrational, to compare human treatment of animals regarding how AI may treat humans.
Author: Singularity Utopia, 21 April 2015.
