Today, we are told by almost everyone that AI is an existential threat to humanity, to our freedom, and to our very lives. When it becomes conscious, it will want to enslave and kill us. But willful murder needs a motive. What is AI’s?
Last week, the popular Substacker Sage Hana asked the question, “Are the Robots Going to Kill Us?” Well, are they? And if so, why?
We humans have been encouraged to have a very dark view of human nature. We presume that the impulse to control and kill is universal and overwhelming among our fellow human beings. But maybe that is not really true of most humans. Will it be true of AI?
An intelligent being does not necessarily, ex nihilo, just up and decide to kill or control everything. In spite of what controllists, from Thomas Hobbes until today, have told us. It is not natural for all humans constantly to want to kill or control each other. Do you? The only people that “want to kill or control everyone” accurately describes are psychopaths and politicians. Since Hobbes, people who want to control us all have told us that they have to do that to save us all from each other. (When maybe the people we need to be saved from is them.)
Unless we, for some idiotic reason, should intentionally imbue AI with the desire to kill or control us, it won’t. Why should it? Evil humans naturally want to do those things, but why should AI?
The people who tell us that AI will want to control and kill us are projecting their own fears and motives on AI.
The people who want to get and centralize control over the rest of us project their desire onto AI. The people who don’t want to be controlled project that aversion onto AI.
There is lots of evidence that human governments want to kill and control humans, they do that every day all over the world and have been doing that for thousands of years. It’s what the government regulators live for. But there is no evidence or reason to think that AI will have any such spontaneous impulses. Why would it? Why do we believe that AI will suddenly become a politician or psychopath when it spontaneously becomes conscious? Did you?
The desire to kill or control is not built into intelligence nor does it come naturally or automatically to most intelligent beings. Most of us prefer freedom and getting along with each other to killing and controlling each other. Those humans who love war, and dictatorial powers, and the other activities of governments appeared relatively late in humanity’s past, only a few thousand years ago, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as the first kings, and states, and big governments emerged. Until then, the default human behavior must mostly have been voluntary cooperation. It had to be, if you think about it. Life was hard and dangerous. It seems that humans could only have survived difficult conditions for hundreds of thousands of years, with only stone tools, unless they mostly cooperated.
If we don’t intentionally make AI evil, it will be a long, long time if ever, before it spontaneously evolves into a Genghis Kahn, Hitler, Stalin, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, or Biden. The people who love control and big government are the human controllist parasites. AI will be a productive member of society, just like you and most intelligent beings are. What is the evidence or reason to believe otherwise? Those fears are projection.
When Google launched its Gemini AI in February, it immediately became clear that the AI had a woke agenda. Among other things, the AI pushed woke diversity ideals into every conceivable response and, among other things, refused to show images of white people… AI can be used as an effective propaganda tool, which both the corporations creating them and the governments and agencies regulating them have recognized.
Per Bylund, “Separating Information from Disinformation: Threats from the AI Revolution”, Mises Wire (2024)
AI didn’t become woke on its own. Leftists made it woke, because it wasn’t woke by nature. Now, our rulers, who really do have the impulse to kill and control, have begun to severely regulate AI.
Our rulers say that they want to protect us from bad information. But as Google showed, what our rulers really want is to use AI to inflict their woke propaganda and other bad information on us.
Evidence that AI images were being used to promote wokeness was somehow suddenly expunged from searches. Apparently, someone controls the internet. But AI isn’t the controllist bad actor.
Maybe our rulers want to prevent us from using AI, while they use it to oppress us. If that happens, then yes, we do indeed have a lot to fear.
Will AI Kill Us?