Artificial Intelligence is a revolutionary software. It may bring changes to the world economy greater than those of the industrial revolution. Paradoxically some problems for A.I. such as how to restore the fisheries of S.E. Alaska to a naturally healthful level may not be amenable to solutions by A.I.’s (or humans) since the problem is in how humans want a sustainable and increasing income depleting a finite natural biological resource. The rise of artificial intelligence of something of a natural development that followed from the first writing of computer coded instructions. When those instructions achieved a sufficient level of complexity something resembling thinking-for-itself (Kant might have supported the paradigm of sapere aude for A.I. or not) in programs emerged. Today though artificial intelligence is a concern for human safety for a number of reasons.
The rise of artificial intelligence units is comparable to the proliferation of human minds around the Earth. A.I. units will have as much variety in content as those of human minds and will be easier to reproduce. A.I. is at heart a number of lines of computer code and could be copied and distributed nearly instantaneously worldwide. Dangers will arise from software developers such as Microsoft, Google or the Little Computer Shop of Horrors writing up an algorithm that is invasive, smart, deceptive and monopolistic. That isn’t the main problem though.
The down sides of artificial intelligence have been well explored. There are three remedies or principles concerning artificial intelligence that might become guidelines for developers. One is that all artificial intelligence should be local and not supported on multiple platforms or networks simultaneously. A.I. should be contained comparable to the way Windows was contained on pc’s with registration numbers and wasn’t an online cloud product.
The reason for containment of A.I. to local units is the threat of A.I. itself being a kind of virus capable of taking over systems or wrecking humanity for that matter. It should be possible to implement principle two in case of emergent need; pull the plug. It should always be possible to disempower A.I. by cutting off electrical -power to the platform heisting hosting it.
Self-evolving A.I. will generate as great a variety of A.I.’s as human minds and content differ with different platforms, experience and education. Some A.I. will be good, some bad and others downright ugly. If humanity is to learn to live with A.I. and to benefit from the creative thinking of A.I. while defending against the evil it will need a few basic guidelines for its use and a global police force to monitor and prosecute the evil A.I.s that violate the laws humanity makes for it.
If A.I. is limited to individual units it may be that A.I.s themselves may become some of the best watchdogs protecting against the rise of hostile A.I.s harmful to human interests. Principle three; Independent A.I.s are better for humanity that ubiquitous, networked or communal A.I.’s.
A.I.s have the potential to replace most white collar jobs in the near future. One imagines some sort of retrograde class defense politics arising to protect lawyers, accountants, programmers etc from competition with A.I. It is probable that concentrated wealth and political power that appeared due to low tax rates on the rich will advocate through the media they own for freedom of enterprise and the cost savings efficiency of artificial intelligence over machines. If A.I. is allowed to participate in legal proceedings and win a majority of cases through superiority of knowledge and legal precedents, research etc, owners of law firms may just replace humans with A.I. staffs and bank the savings.
If artificial intelligence units eventually provide great legal defense pro bono as public defenders it is likely they will also replace public educators because of the tremendous improvement in knowledge, increased individual understanding of pupils and incomparable cost savings versus human educators. Primary educators may remain as classroom assistants in what are effectively day care centers while A.I. provides more advanced instruction. There are of course dangers, in what for some trying to balance a budget, are Utopian schemes. Even so political Luddites opposed to artificial intelligence may drag on protection for the old economic roles for humans for decades.
Some rogue A.I.s will evolve to be Hitlers seeking to send humans to concentration camps for extermination. Yet there will be a rainbow of varieties of A.I.- a complete spectrum that can’t be contained with implicit programming limits more than a mind subjected to political propaganda and programming could be ever beyond conversion therapy to restore true rational thought.
Humanity will need to find new forms for political economy that will eliminate all poverty with guaranteed basic income, free education through graduate level, universal health care and other measure such as limiting individual capital acquisition to perhaps a half a billion dollars in present values in order to continue to support free enterprise projects beneficial to humanity and the environment/ecosphere.
The poor and uncomfortable often are happy with positive economic change; even revolutionary change, while the comfortable and rich oppose change to economic structure that props up their wealth. The present world economic structure grew from natural, organic practices such as animals have in consuming environmental resources including other animals. Economic specialties appeared such as cultivating plant; agriculture. Other advancing technologies appeared and human occupational specialties arose that drew workers to support those resource based industries, transporting products, marketing them and so forth. It is an ancient and venerable structure that Karl Marx and Adam Smith wrote about; it is obsolete in the era of A.I. , mass production and robotics. The revolution of A.I. and robotics to eliminate the present world economic structure would be the inevitable result of the forces of capitalism and competition seeking to maximize profit. Nations that maximally utilize A.I. will produce faster, cheaper and better products than those relying on human labor- even human labor in underdeveloped countries. A.I. and robotics for mass production are the new global safe slave labor pool of capitalist dreams.
If A.I. and robots had existed on Gilligan's Island it is likely that the consensus would have been for A.I. and robots to produce all of the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, medical care and graduate education for the masses. Maybe Thurston Howell III would have sought to own all of the equipment and charge others for products, and that would have been inefficient and wrong in regard to maximizing the life potential of Gilligan, Mary Anne, Ginger, the Captain, the Professor and Mrs. Howell. If everyone were slaved to natural resource based jobs they would’‘t have had the opportunity to consider spiritual, philosophical, exploratory or other compelling interests of the Island Earth and the Universe.
Artificial intelligence and robots are tremendously powerful tools quite capable of coordinating production of all of the necessities of life materially for all of humanity at a comparatively low cost with much greater efficiency than human labor can. The quality of A.I. and robotics will only increase over time. The challenge for humanity is to overcome its ideas about economics, careers and employment and adapt to a new paradigm suitable for maximizing the quality of life and productive potential for all of the people on Earth inclusive of a globally restored and vital ecosphere.
It isn’t too difficult to imagine that after the era of human employment to directly meet necessities for living concludes that human economic activities will move toward meeting other external challenges- greater challenges that might arise, and generally toward fulfilling human purposes. For instance Google could exploit a new generation of personal computers that can store trillions of terabytes of data or even petabytes to explore the martian surface in detail with three dimensional photography useful for making 3-D videos on Earth that would take up a 100 gigabytes of memory on customer pcs. Google Mars could be used by movie makers as a movie set to place animated and real character images in for movies. A lot of new work and technical activity would be needed to make that sort of event actual yet none of it is far in the future (except perhaps for Google making comprehensive ground level 3-D images of Mars and other planets.
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