AI: The future of humanity and artificial intelligence

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The Argument From Stephen Hawking's Cat

Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant people alive, but say he wants to get his cat into the cat carrier. How's he going to do it?

He can model the cat's behavior in his mind and figure out ways to persuade it. He knows a lot about feline behavior. But ultimately, if the cat doesn't want to get in the carrier, there's nothing Hawking can do about it despite his overpowering advantage in intelligence.

Even if he devoted his career to feline motivation and behavior, rather than theoretical physics, he still couldn't talk the cat into it.

You might think I'm being offensive or cheating because Stephen Hawking is disabled. But an artificial intelligence would also initially not be embodied, it would be sitting on a server somewhere, lacking agency in the world. It would have to talk to people to get what it wants.

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The Argument From My Roommate

My roommate was the smartest person I ever met in my life. He was incredibly brilliant, and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips.

The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation.

It's perfectly possible an AI won't do much of anything, except use its powers of hyperpersuasion to get us to bring it brownies.

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The Argument From Childhood

Intelligent creatures don't arise fully formed. We're born into this world as little helpless messes, and it takes us a long time of interacting with the world and with other people in the world before we can start to be intelligent beings.

Even the smartest human being comes into the world helpless and crying, and requires years to get some kind of grip on themselves.

It's possible that the process could go faster for an AI, but it is not clear how much faster it could go. Exposure to real-world stimuli means observing things at time scales of seconds or longer.

Moreover, the first AI will only have humans to interact with—its development will necessarily take place on human timescales. It will have a period when it needs to interact with the world, with people in the world, and other baby superintelligences to learn to be what it is.

Furthermore, we have evidence from animals that the developmental period *grows* with increasing intelligence, so that we would have to babysit an AI and change its (figurative) diapers for decades before it grew coordinated enough to enslave us all.

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