I do not think Donald Trump’s rebranding Artificial Intelligence to Super Intelligence is a good thing. I think it is a real misnomer. In fact, it is one step towards humanizing A/I. It reminds me of the movie Blade Runner based on Philip K Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A lot of people are preaching the end of humanity with the advances in A/I or S/I. In my mind, it is really nothing more than semantics. Is there something inherently being changed within this manufactured intelligences that warrants a name change? Is it more than a governmental rebrand? Is it like the New Coke debacle that took place in 1985 when Coke-Cola decided to dump its traditional Coke for something new? Oh, and that took a “real thing” belly flop for Coke.
Or, is “super intelligence” something much more. In Dick’s book he explores deeper forces taking place than just asking a chat bot to make a hotel reservation. According to litcharts.com Dick “suggests that empathy is humanity’s defining trait, contrasting it against the emotional detachment of androids.” My question is: would that same empathy be reciprocated, particularly if a human had to pull the plug on A/I.
Humanity has been living with some sort of dystopian end-of-the-world beliefs probably since man first started looking up at the stars at night and witnessed a complete lunar eclipse. These beliefs can be religious or from science fiction. On the science fiction side of it Orson Wells jump started the dystopian genre with his 1938 broadcast War of the Worlds. If anything, Jules Vern, Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have proved Isaac Asimov belief that “today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact. We are in the world of A/I science fact.
For the most part Science fiction has given us helpful robots like “Robot” in the 1960s TV show: Lost in Space to R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars. And of course there was the rouge Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator. Both immediately opened us up the evil side of rouge A/I. Both introduced a doubt about “supper” intelligence cohabiting with humans.
But it is just not science fiction. Christianity itself is steeped in apocalyptic doom. The last book of the New Testament deals with the Second Coming; Take Revelation 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”
Or as REM sings: It is the end of the world as we know. It is a concept that has been hanging over humanity for centuries–more so now with the advent of nuclear weapons. Where does A/I fit into this “brave new world.”
Whether we call it A/I or S/I our lives as humans are going to change. But that is what technolgy does it changes our lives. And for some it does mean the end of the world as they knew it. (Does anybody make buggy whips anymore?)
Take the shift from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. It happened way back in ancient times but it was a radical shift. That shift, though, did not take place with the lift of a switch or juice being sucked off into a data center. It was a slow moving change.
The Bronze Age was known for an era the when the Egyptian New Kingdom flourished, the pyramids in Geza were built. It was moving away from stone tools and the mixing of copper and tin that created a durable metal for weapons and tools. It could have been the rare earth metals of the day. But this alloy lead to advances in agriculture. The problem was that copper and tin just weren’t laying around. Copper and tin had to be mined. The mining of ore lead to trade which lead to some political stability for many centuries. The concept of free trade ends wars may have been a concept in its infancy then.
But like with any technology, somebody came up with a comparative mouse trap–and made it better. In this case iron. Some poor old metallurgist who ran out of copper and tin was searching around for a substitute and found it in iron and carbon. He came up with a better mouse trap and the Bronze Age slowly turned into the Iron Age. For humans, it was a game changer.
Now here is my game changer with artificial intelligence, it, is here to stay. But I like the term artificial because it is not human, nor is it human intelligence. Sure it may think like a human and sound like a human with the proper inputs–but it ain’t human. Is it super? Cambridge Dictionary defines super as “extremely good, above average, or to a very high degree. And, as a prefix Vocabulary.Com+5 say the word derives “from Latin meaning “above, over, or beyond,” denoting something that exceeds normal limits or ranks higher (e.g., superhuman, supersonic)” However, putting the word super in there we are automatically elevating A/I to a level above human, like Super-human.
Right now we are looking at machines but what happens when an android or robot creates a legal case that works its way up to the Supreme Court claiming its rights have been violated. Or, it has a right to exist. It may sound strange but then Citizens United affirmed the belief that a corporation, Political Action Committees and Unions have free speech rights–and they are not even sentient beings but a conglomeration of money.
