Debate on AI - Humans are evolving

Last week I participated in a public debate on Artificial Intelligence. I spoke on the pro-AI side. I'm posting my prepared speech below - the actual speech may have deviated from what I had intended to say.

~*~

My friends I wasn’t meant to be speaking here tonight. Chris didn’t want me to tell you the truth. The unvarnished truth. The terrifying truth.

The fact is, within one year, at most, your species Homo Sapiens will be extinct.

Yes. The machines are coming for you.

{Point to someone in the audience. In German accent:}

“You there, I want your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle”.

But alas, my friends, the machines are not coming for us as in The Terminator, or The Matrix. We’re not even going to get Commander Data, let alone C3PO or R2D2.

When it comes to sentience or ‘thinking machines’, we are alone in the universe.

Worse though – we have already got HAL9000 from 2001 A space odyssey. I can guarantee that every single person in this room has had a computer tell them ‘Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can’t do that’. And … not so politely either.

No. I’m afraid the truth is far more boring. Our species is going to evolve – from homo sapiens (wise man – can you believe that we have named our species ‘wise man’?) to homo deus. We are evolving into gods.

To be clear – not gods in the Abrahamic sense, we are not creators of heaven and earth and all that, but rather in a Greek god sense. We have increasing control over our environment and our own destinies in a technological sense.

The notion that we – as a species – are evolving into gods was first proposed by Noah Yuval Harari in his book of the same name. For completeness – he is not enamoured by the idea of artificial intelligence.

Our species emerged about 300,000 years ago. Since that time we have expanded from our original hunting grounds – probably in what is modern day Botswana – and now occupy the very top of the food chain. Humans are the apex predator on the planet. Our closest relative in the animal kingdom is the chimpanzee. Our human brother and sister species are extinct.

We have won the Darwinian game and outcompeted every other species on the planet because we are tool makers. Other species are tool users. Other species have rudimentary communication. Other species cooperate with each other. We are tool makers.

More than any other species, we have made our world. Like the gods we are becoming, we have made the world in our image.

Artificial intelligence is the latest in a long list of tools that we have created to make our world a better place. Since the dawn of our species we have economised on our brain power and our labour power.

Our first tool was our hands. Did you know that on one hand you can count to 12?

Did you know that language was developed for the purposes of gossip? Humans love gossip. Why do you think that ‘reality television’ is so popular? Gossip is a mechanism of social control, a mechanism to ensure good behaviour by all members of the community. Counting is a technology that becomes important once we move beyond 12 items. Writing is a technology to conduct business. All those cuneiform clay tablets don’t tell great stories of the gods. No – they tend to be business inventories and invoices and the like. Money is a technology to facilitate trade. Debt is a technology to facilitate trade across time. All those technologies economised on human brain power.

Then we have technology that economies on labour power. The steam engine was invented to pump water out of mines. In the last 100 years, we have seen the incredible disruption that household labour saving devices have had on female emancipation.

For the most part advances in technology have had unambiguously positive impacts on human flourishing. There are some exceptions – the whip may have led to great productivity gains, but at a huge human cost, and modern weapon systems are not obviously a positive benefit to humanity. The argument that military technology has positive externalities in civilian applications is not false, but it is very much oversold.

At every step of our evolutionary path over the past 300, 000 years we have attempted to economise on brain-power and labour-power. Automation has improved our lives immensely. Yet at every step along the way, there have been nay-sayers. Luddites. Doomsters. Scaredy-cats.

Artificial intelligence is just another tool. Like all tools it can be used well or badly. Like all tools it brings out both the best and worst in us.

This is what AI does – in particular, what generative AI does. It is a general knowledge box. Remember how we’re always saying to people that they should ‘think outside the box’? Well, AI ‘knows’ a lot of what is inside the box.

Not everything. It’s not always correct. It takes a talented human to work well with AI.

The bottom line is that there is no comparative advantage to being a ‘know it all' anymore. We now have a machine for that.

Noah Yuval Harari thinks that AI will result in us losing some aspect of our humanity. I’m a huge fan of his thinking, but on this point, I think he is wrong. At every step of our technological journey, we have made it easier to do hard and difficult things. This has allowed us to live more human lives. To thrive in a world of AI, humans will have to specialise in those things we are very good at:

• Creativity

• Compassion

• Complexity

• Context

My friends, all these arguments that AI will result in human extermination are just silly. It takes imagination to contemplate such a thing – we know that machines simply lack imagination. Machines will never be entrepreneurs either. Sure AI will improve the efficiency of bad actors – but know this, they are bad actors already.

AI will however massively improve the efficiency of people who want to truck, barter, and trade. AI is the tool of unleash the human imagination on the next step of our evolution.

So, if you’ll permit one more Terminator joke, “Come with me, if you want to live”.