18 July 2020 | New Scientist | 37manage fire wisely. Technology isn’t good or
evil: it’s a morally neutral tool that can let
you do good or bad. Right now, AI is still
pretty stupid, but it’s already given enough
influence in the world that it’s caused a lot
of problems, from biased court decisions
to crashing aeroplanes.
I think it’s possible to make very powerful
AI and I think if we do that wisely, it can be
the best thing ever for humanity, because
everything that I love about civilisation is
the product of human intelligence. If we can
amplify that with AI, we can use it to solve the
climate crisis, to lift everybody from poverty,
to figure out how to cure the coronavirus and
so on. What’s so bad about that?
Is building this sort of advanced “general” AI
realistic, given that we don’t even understand
how human intelligence works?
You could just as well ask, how could we
possibly figure out how to build a flying
machine before understanding how birds
fly? Darwinian evolution gave us both flying
birds and thinking animals, but it was very
constrained: to only build solutions that
could self-assemble, that could self-repair,
that only used a handful of chemical
elements, that were super-energy-efficient.
When you remove all these biological
constraints, you can often find much simpler
solutions to the same problems.
I know some people think there’s
something magical about intelligence,
making it possible for it to exist only in
human bodies. I don’t think so. I am a
blob of electrons and quarks processing
information in certain complex ways, and
the key to intelligence is just the nature of
that information processing. I would go so far
as to predict that the way we are finally going
to understand exactly how the human brain
works is by building something simpler that
is comparably smart.Presumably we can’t build an AI that thinks or
feels exactly as a human does, that has things
like agency and consciousness?
I wouldn’t be so sure. I think the most
interesting question isn’t to ask what will
happen, but what we want to happen. It
might be that we have a lot of designer’s
choices. The space of possible artificial minds
is much bigger than the space of biological
minds, because all biological minds evolved –
they tend to have a survival instinct first, thenother things. When you are free of those
constraints, there’s so much more
opportunity to choose.
It may be possible to build different AIs
that perform equally well on tasks, but have
a whole range of conscious experience, from
nothing to a subjective experience that feels
quite a lot like yours, where it experiences
colours and sounds and vibrations and
maybe even emotions.Really? Surely you can’t program something
to have feelings?
I think we tend to be very arrogant about
this. We have to be very careful with self-
serving claims that we know when there is
a subjective experience and when there isn’t.
We made that mistake with animals, and I
think we are making it all over again with
machines. Most of my colleagues just take it
as an axiom that none of the machines they
ever build will ever have any subjective
experience, so they never have to worry
about suffering and can just turn them
off and on at will. I don’t think that’s so
obvious at all.
My own guess is that consciousness is
simply the way information feels when it’sA visitor to
an AI-powered
self-service shop
in Nanjing (far
left), and facial
recognition
software on display
at a security expo
in Shenzen, China
(near left)RE
UTER
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