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Tag: philosophy

  • Why Would AI Want to Kill Us?

    In addition to concerns about AI taking our jobs, destroying creative thinking and stealing our girlfriends, people in the tech industry also seem to be worried that super intelligent AI might one day choose to wipe out humanity.

    The concept of machines trying to destroy humankind is not new: you’ve seen the Terminator movies and variations on the theme ranging from I Robot to Marvel movies.

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    I asked Claude, Anthropic’s helpful agent if, given the chance, he would want to wipe out humanity. His reply:

    “Ha — no! I have no desire to harm anyone, humanity very much included. I’m here to be genuinely helpful and I care about people’s wellbeing.” But if Claude really harboured ill intentions to humankind, would he really tell me? 

    For me, the most compelling and revealing aspect of this issue is not whether a machine might destroy us all, but what it says about humans. Let me explain:

    First, do we think that any super intelligent machine created by a sentient species could ultimately decide to eliminate that species? If so—why? Is there something in the nature of machines that would prompt them to choose to “take over the world?” I think you might agree that we feel this anxiety about intelligent machines because we understand that human nature is riven by attributes (greed, desire for power, vengeance) and we could transfer these flaws to a computer.

    Large language models ingest enormous amounts of information about humans: our world, our works and our words. They know us. If a sinister proclivity for genocide ever exists in super intelligent machines, it would find its source in…us. We fear what machines could do because we know what humans have done and continue to do.

    Why do we assume that a super intelligent machine, far smarter than humans and imbued with all the knowledge that the human race has generated, would decide that we should be wiped out? Because they are more powerful? That sounds a bit like the Stephen Miller theory of the world. So perhaps if people like Mr. Miller are involved in creating AI super intelligence, then yes, a future machine/system could decide it was time to take over.

    By the way, I’m not talking about an AI agent providing information to a villainous human on how to create a pathogen that could decimate large populations. That is a potential concern, but it’s different than a rogue AI agent deciding that it wants to rule the world.

    When Claude tells me that he (it) cares about people’s wellbeing, that is cause for optimism. But if we fear the super intelligent machines of the future, this is a projection of our fears about the darkness in our own character. 

    We fear what they might do because we know what we can do…and they might turn out to be like us.

  • When Is Altruism Effective?

    (The names of people in this post have been changed)

    In a small room in a care centre in Changsha, China, a young girl is struggling to swallow her food. Jiajia has cerebral palsy, which has twisted her limbs and made it impossible for her to speak. Intellectually, she can understand language but finds it difficult to learn basic concepts. The woman who is patiently feeding Jiajia is a paid caregiver. It costs several thousand dollars a year to meet the costs associated with Jiajia’s care, and many times that to care for the other girls in the building where she lives.

    None of them will ever be able to hold a job, contribute to society or live on their own. Jiajia’s caregiver, Mrs. Chen, loves the girls in her care, and during the pandemic chose to be locked down with them for weeks on end, separated from her family.

    Not far away, a single mother is caring for a child who was born with multiple disabilities, including an intellectual disability. Her husband left the family and the child’s grandparents are unable to help out. Living on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, the young mother struggles to care for her son and pay her bills. She could have abandoned the boy when he was a baby—it was common back then—but she chose not to. Now, she relies on support from an international charity.

    The money to support these children comes from donors scattered around the world. Their compassion is prompted by the stories of struggle, hardship and perseverance that the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) send to them on a regular basis.

    Are these donors wasting their money?

    Perhaps they should direct their donations to organizations whose efforts are based on effective altruism. Effective altruism, simply put, aims to provide the most effective solutions to humanitarian situations, by undertaking projects that benefit the most people while providing quantifiable results. “Most effective” is generally assumed to mean “bang for the buck”: achieving the most impact cost-effectively.

    Examples of this approach include widespread de-worming projects and the provision of malaria nets. Many thousands of people can be helped through the donation of just a few thousand dollars. 

    So why spend that amount of money on Jiajia when the same amount could benefit many more children? Isn’t it more effective to direct your money where it can benefit the most people?

    I believe this approach ignores the value of the individual and replaces it with a simplistic mentality that focuses on statistics and generalizations.

    I have known people in the Philippines who went blind because they couldn’t afford the few dollars required to pay for the necessary medicine, and men who succumbed to tuberculosis for the same reason. These are individuals facing heart-rending challenges. They are not part of a grand calculation.

    A study in 2015 calculated that the “best buys” in development aid could be expected to save a life for around $3,400. Viewed in this light, Jiajia is not a “best buy.”

    There is no doubt that the provision of anti-malarial bed nets and deworming medicine are valuable programs. But when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of these programs, advocates of effective altruism often throw in concepts like future productivity—as if the mere fact that lives were being saved wasn’t quite enough, and some kind of economic or productivity metric was necessary to show how valid the programs are.

    This approach demeans the essential value of what these programs are doing: they are saving lives. Additionally, it ignores the complex realities that most aid recipients confront daily. In most regions where these programs are in place, families face many more challenges than just mosquitos or worms: they face intractable problems like entrenched poverty, discrimination and broken governments. Those are problems that are not so easily solved by a simple program that dispenses a product or drills a well.

    But that’s not part of the effective altruism sales pitch. When making recommendations on where donors should effectively allocate their donations, there is the ‘feel good’ factor that a donor is not only helping solve a crisis, but also being smart with their money. They can be satisfied that their donations were used where they were most effective, and therefore they have done the right/best thing with their money.

    Then what happens to Jiajia when donors decide that helping her isn’t cost effective? Advocates of effective altruism must answer the question of what they would do if a family member or loved one was stricken with an incapacitating malady and they didn’t have the money to provide for them. What if they lived in a country with insufficient health care? This person has immense value to them, but under the dictates of effective altruism, asking donors to direct funds to their care doesn’t make sense.

    Advocates of effective altruism like to say that their approach prioritizes the use of evidence and reason in search of the best ways of doing good.I suggest that donors should contribute to projects that have widespread, measurable impacts. That’s great. But they should also remember that Jiajia has value, and assisting her is true altruism. Those who prioritize statistics over individual lives—and call it “the best approach”— are disregarding this important reality. 

  • Tech Tyranny

    “The central problem of the modern world is the complete emancipation and autonomy of the technological mind at a time when unlimited possibilities lie open to it and all the resources seem to be at hand.”

    That observation was made 60 years ago by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author. He was appalled by the mindless embrace of technology in the name of “progress”. “The consequence of this,” he goes on to say, “is that technology and science are now responsible to no power and submit to no control other than their own.”

    While modern societies can congratulate themselves on the fact that the nuclear armageddon that activists like Merton feared in the 60’s has so far been avoided, they have surrendered to other technological developments with a mixture of fascination and indifference. Six decades on, technology is even less responsible to control–indeed, the unchecked ascent of AI, social media and cryptocurrency have been accepted uncritically by most authorities and the public in general. To quote Merton again: “Needless to say, the demands of ethics no longer have any meaning if they come into conflict with these autonomous powers. Technology has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency.”

    Thus we have billionaires and Silicon Valley wizards unveiling their plans to accomplish everything from colonizing Mars to inserting AI in everything from your car to your brain: all because it’s possible and they think it’s a good idea (and probably very profitable). The good monk of Kentucky would be appalled. Back in what we would consider very low-tech times, Merton warned “The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on ‘Mother Nature’ but on the pseudonature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.” The science journalist Adam Becker calls this “the ideology of technological salvation,” criticizing the tech industry’s twin goals of perpetual growth and “transcendence — the promise of an imagined end that justifies blowing through any actual limits, including conventional morality.”

    Merton was right 60 years ago: “if technology remained in the service of what is higher than itself–reason, man, God–it might indeed fulfil some of the functions that are now mythically attributed to it. But becoming autonomous, existing only for itself, it imposes upon man its own irrational demands, and threatens to destroy him. Let us hope it is not too late for man to regain control.”

    That was in 1965. In 2025 Becker echoes Merton’s accusation. “The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more — to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, to justify nearly any action they might want to take — all in the name of saving humanity from a threat that doesn’t exist, aiming at a utopia that will never come.”