I hate it when people say humanity’s problems will be solved by “artificial superintelligence” as though all we need to fix the cruelty and abusiveness in our world is an AI that is smarter than a human.
Mark Zuckerberg voiced this talking point again today in a Twitter thread claiming that “superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses.” Last month he said the following in a statement titled “The Future is for Everyone — The Path to a Positive AI Future”:
“In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express new ideas, learn new concepts, and advance our health and quality of life. As we get closer to this moment, it is important to develop a philosophy for how we can best use superintelligence to ensure it improves all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.”
These talking points annoy me because it’s an absolutely specious claim that artificial superintelligence will benefit everyone. Humanity’s problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence, our problems are caused by greedy plutocrats like Zuckerberg. It’s like a serial killer telling us we can stop serial killing by making serial killers smarter.
The argument hinges on the premise that humanity is suffering because we’re just not smart enough to come up with the right solutions, when in reality that hasn’t been the case for a very long time. Humanity has had the technology and resources to solve all its major problems for generations; we’ve just chosen to use our technology and resources making rich people richer instead.
We’ve long had the ability to end extreme poverty, to stop destroying our biosphere, to stop waging wars, to stop pillaging the global south at unfair prices, to stop imposing starvation sanctions, to end genocides, to remove money from politics, to institute true democracy, to create a well-informed electorate free from propaganda brainwashing, and to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. This hasn’t failed to happen due to our lack of superintelligence, it has failed to happen because the people with the power and the money actively stop it from happening.
No amount of added cleverness is going to make plutocrats less greedy, make warmongers less bloodthirsty, make politicians less corrupt, make empire managers less tyrannical, make imperial propagandists less deceitful and manipulative, or make capitalists less exploitative and ecocidal. Give them artificial superintelligence and they’ll just use it to grab up more money and control, just like they’re doing with the AI of the present day.
We can already see that AI is not making the world a better place. It’s already taking away jobs, facilitating war crimes and mass surveillance, poisoning art, and making people crazy and stupid. We’re already witnessing the results of more intelligent AI. Continuing to say we just need the AI to be more intelligent is like taking a pill to get healthy, having a terrible reaction to the medicine, and then deciding we just need to dramatically increase the dose.
Artificial superintelligence isn’t going to solve all our problems because our problems don’t arise from insufficient intelligence. We don’t need artificial superintelligence, we need basic human kindness. We need justice. We need ethics. No matter how much intelligence we add to the AI soup, it’s never going to magically add up to simple human morality. Which is what we’re actually going to need if we’re going to create a healthy world.
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Feature image by Anthony Quintano from Honolulu, HI, United States — Mark Zuckerberg F8 2018 Keynote, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72122390
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