I have worked in for most of my fifty-year scientific career in artificial Intelligence (AI)-related fields studying both human and artificial processing methods. With the recent resurgence in interest in AI in our society, I have been surprised by how easily humans have accepted the inevitability of AI as a part of our lives. As we blindly push forward, concepts such as autonomy, machine control and decision-making, risk and machine ethics are all being tossed around without much thought for the long-term implications for the human race. I thought a few words about where I believe we might end up might be interesting. [The following excerpt is taken from a book I am currently writing.]

Why do we believe we need to create artificial life? We humans can’t even get along with other humans on this earth. What makes us feel we can get along with an artificially-created (superior) lifeform that quite possibly will eventually either enslave or destroy us? Almost every discussion of the dangers of AI begins with a recognition of the so-called “laws of robotics’. These laws were written in an attempt to protect man from its own creation, emphasizing the fact that AI has the very real potential to be very dangerous to humankind. Despite this very real danger we stumble blindly along the path towards creating artificial life perhaps with the belief that we can stop before things get too far. (i.e. my mommy told me if I did it I would go blind so I’ll just do it until I need glasses then I’ll stop)! Unfortunately, if history has taught us anything, we know that humans will not stop but will continue to push for knowledge until they fall blindly off the cliff. (This cliff is a metaphor for the point at which we either completely destroy ourselves or are forced to surrender our position at the top of the food chain to continue to survive). When that point comes there are two choices we can make..

1) We can stop creating AI before it is too late (Something we will never do. Just look at our dangerous forays into messing with human DNA).
2) We can blindly continue to try to create artificial lifeforms in our relentless quest for knowledge.

We already know the answer. Our constant ‘drive to survive’ will cause us to continue to strive towards gaining knowledge. Like the story of Adam and Eve and tree of life in the biblical record, we will give up our God-given mastery over the earth and animals and begin the slow journey down the food chain towards life as a master-survivor (i.e., a race that has found a way to survive under any circumstances). This will quite likely require us to take on a drastically different physical and mental form.

[SIDE THOUGHT] Consider this. Are roaches actually the remnants of a long-forgotten race that reached that end long before we will? Because we are constantly driven to learn to enhance our chances of survival, both individually and as a planetary race. My question is…do we have the right to start down this path knowing that we would be dooming our ancestors to live in darkness under the sinks of our superior artificially-intelligent master’s eons from now? As I stated earlier, we already know the answer my fellow roaches.

The reason we are driven to create what we mistakenly call Artificial Intelligence is not really our fault. Our brains are programmed by evolution to do one thing…to assure the survival of the individual human, and by extension the whole human race. The question is, can we have both the knowledge we desire and mastery of life?

We can, but we must realize before it’s too late is that what we really need is to change ourselves and not create a new AI-based lifeform. Since the first primate picked up a stick to get tasty termites out of a dirt mound, we have been enhancing ourselves to be better. Let’s forget the biblical predictions for a moment and imagine humankind many thousands of years in the future. We will be overcrowded and running out of resources on the earth and we will quickly start to run out of easily-retrievable resources on close-by planets. We already know that the human body, as it exists now, can’t tolerate long-term space habitation so we will be forced to use our knowledge of DNA to make those changes necessary to allow us to leave this planet permanently and live in other parts of the universe. In a nutshell, we must limit our 70% water-based form, which will make us smaller and thinner (but stronger). This will allow us to live for long periods in cramped quarters. Our senses, especially the eyes would be changed to have a greater response in the infrared parts of the spectrum where more information exists (instead of the visible spectrum). Our outer covering (skin) would change color and be almost metallic in hue and our heads would be much larger to hold the AI-based processing capabilities we developed over the millennia.

So, what, my friends, will this new human spacefaring life form most likely look like?

Andy Bevilacqua, PhD.