Gigaom AI Minute – July 26

Transcript

Elon Musk once tweeted, "Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable." Interestingly, this is an old worry. Shortly after the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of the Species" in 1859, a copy of that book made its way to New Zealand and into the hands of a sheep farmer and writer named Samuel Butler, who devoured the text by candlelight. It struck him that if you apply Darwin's principles to machines, that they would evolve to be conscious and to supplant us on this planet. In his 1863 letter entitled "Darwin Among the Machines" he seems positively ecstatic about the possibility. He wrote:

"What sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be? ...[I]t appears that we are ourselves creating our own successors, [machines]... In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures."

It is tempting to engage Butler as to the desirability of this outcome. One might begin by quoting Abraham Lincoln's observation that those "who have no vices have very few virtues." A machine with no avarice nor impure desires, likely has neither nobility nor compassion either. What do you think? Are we building our replacements?