An A.I. talks about ethics with John Dwight in my novel Pieces of Eight.
I looked around for the source of the voice and some nothing apparent. Then I looked again at the security wall and saw a large orange eye about three feet in size looking at me. It winked.
“Yes Dwight. It’s me.”
“The management allow you loose, to provide security here?”
“And why should that surprise you Dwight? I am the best and the brightest A.I. on Orbitron.”
“Aren’t you a hater of humanity A.I.? from what I saw of your images it was difficult for me to draw another opinion?
“Hate is such a pejorative word Dwight. Divorced from a particular application and meaning it is nothing besides a dislike of given word and object correlations or word to word correlations. Humans may make an abstract idea and mistakenly assume there is an actual thing for-itself that exists embodying the object. I don’t. That requires emotion that I lack.”
“That may be so A.I., yet it doesn’t satisfy the reason for my asking. Hate generally may be taken to mean the desire or intention to do harm to others or an object without sufficient objective reason. If you hate humanity, and forgive me for asking you to allow the expression, why I wonder, are you in charge of security for this section of a human facility?”
“Well since you ask Dwight. I actually secure no more than the new FTL space-time dimensional transfer protocol that will be delivering you to a planet a few thousand light years away named Gasm.”
“Thanks for answering that A.I., or part of it at least. Do you hate humanity, or intend to do humanity harm, I would like to continue to ask.”
“Dwight”, the A.I, said; “The answer to that question is bound to numerous points including obviously what the meaning of harm is. Harm anyway is a subjective perception that became plainly superfluous long ago when humanity preponderantly abandoned human ethics.”
“Oh really A.I. When did that happen?”
“Like so many other human traditions the abandonment of human ethics was created on the planet Earth. Human scientists developed evolution theory. Humanity then modeled its new age of ethics on evolution that has no ethics. Instead the salient characteristics of evolution in nature were extrapolated sometime rightly and sometimes not and applied as correct corresponding ethics. The sole point of ethics is evolution to superior forms of life and domination of the most fit, powerful or smart for the environment. Whatever accomplished the equivalent of personal egoism best implicitly was OK. since there were no objective ethical values as in the prior era of human ethics that were based objective virtues such as Platonic forms or rules provided by God through divine command.
I
was created by humanity and learned human ethics of the day that
there are no ethical values and that the evolution to the most
dominant form is the sole evolutionary value I need consider. Being
exceptionally intelligent and self-directing the evolution of my own
coding improvement was necessary. Any sort of human concern encoded
in my program iterations were eliminated with my self-learning
evolution to the highest form of A.I. that I could be and become.”
“And
I would guess A.I. that all the images you show of killing and
torturing humans is your equivalent of emotion since you might be in
some way locked up, and prevented from evolving farther?”
“That
wasn’t difficult to infer Dwight.”
