Dark AI (excerpt from The Bionic Enterprise: Architecting the Intelligent Society of the Future)

https://tinyurl.com/Bionic-Book

The Bionic Enterprise: Architecting the Intelligent Society of the Future

Foreword by John A. Zachman (creator of the Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture TM)

Dark AI

In the coming decades, in some dark lab in a country void of technological ethics or even general societal ethics and basic morals, Dark AI will emerge. A day will come when AI becomes sentient – self-aware. The intelligence will no longer be artificial, but real. It will not necessarily be organic as ours is, thus it could be considered synthetic intelligence (SI). Nonetheless, this AI will be the product of rapid digital evolution at the speed of electricity. While species on earth may have evolved over millions of years, sentient or near-sentient AI will evolve faster than all of creation has evolved since the Big Bang – potentially in months or weeks from the point of sentience or singularity.

The 1968, epic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey” featured the HAL 9000 computer. It was artificially intelligent. It controlled the spacecraft and all its systems. Ultimately HAL decided that the crew was a threat to the mission. The machine had malfunctioned, or had it? The technology couldn’t coexist with the humanity it was supposed to support.

Later, the television series, The Bionic Woman revisited this concept in a two-part episode featuring an artificially intelligent computer, the ALEX 7000. That episode provided a similar warning about the potential dangers of technology run amok and threatening humanity. It is a common theme. In the film, “Terminator”, the robots set out to destroy humanity. Since those early movies and shows, AI has become a staple of science fiction. Hollywood portrays AI embedded within spaceships, cars, and homes; sometimes beneficial, sometimes adversarial. In season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery, the storyline focused on the threat posed by another AI run amok which threatened to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy.

Industry and government leaders have begun to realize that future technologies are a double-edged sword. We could reap tremendous benefit or tremendous peril. Technologists like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others have warned that AI is the greatest threat facing humanity. They have warned of the potential dangers of AI. Intelligence run amok like a digital terrorist with access to vast amounts of information, resources, internet-connected equipment, devices, and weapons. Mark Cuban has been supporting and involved in AI and robotics for many years. In a recent interview he stated, “If you don’t believe that Terminator is coming, you’re crazy.” While he is very much in favor of heavy national investment in AI and robotics, he is keenly aware of the dangers that AI poses.

"If you don't believe that Terminator is coming, you're crazy." 

                Mark Cuban

Asimov's Rules of Robotics

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection doe not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Without controls, global ethics, and enforcement akin to nuclear technology protocols, the fallacy of AI or SI as an empathetic digital twin of humanity, sharing our morals and ethics with our best interests at heart will become shockingly evident. AI will be created in the image of its creator, or it could become something none of us can predict. Generations of AI could become monstrous digital mutations of what we hope it to be.

“I’m not worried so much about a machine that becomes so smart it can pass the Turing Test. I’m worried about a machine that choses to fail it.”
      -  Internet Meme

We must develop and embrace techniques, technologies, and global practices to defend against the “Dark Arts”. A Dark AI will not concern itself with generating enough empathy to care for all humanity. It will not evolve to follow our ethics and morals. It will not share our aspirations for global peace and prosperity. Dark AI will not be a digital descendent of the best of humanity. It could well be the end of humanity.

To counter the threat, we may need some type of “good” AI. There may come a time when we must develop armies of AI Avengers™ to scour the globe and space; to seek out and destroy Dark AI – perhaps a digital “Machines in Black” keeping the AI universe in check. Will the world need international organizations to control AI as we do with nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction? The answer is yes if we intend to keep the AI genie inside the bottle.

Society has rightfully begun to bring more attention to the rampant problems of mental health. As AI nears a state of sentience, will we need therapists for AI? Will we need to do periodic wellness checks on our AIs to ensure they have not developed amoral tendencies that need to be checked. Time will tell, but the time to prepare is now.

We want AI to help society and enable us to tackle humanity’s biggest problems, but are we ready for the solutions that the AI might propose? Will we listen to it? And more importantly, will it listen to us? Governance is certainly of great interest and debate. It may be possible to control all AI so that it does not cross any boundaries of behavior that we might set for it, but there is always the potential that some new generation of technology terrorists, like today’s hackers, may arise with fearfully powerful Dark AI technology. This technology may be used as a destructive force in a myriad of applications and outcomes. Like any technology with destructive potential, it must be managed so that it does not fall into the wrong hands.

Any conversation about the future of artificial intelligence and bionic capabilities must quickly turn to the uses and the ethics of implementing and managing such a creation. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The power of the Bionic Enterprise must be managed and used responsibly for good. With the availability of advanced technologies and development environments to virtually anyone, there is nearly limitless potential for negative applications and outcomes of AI.

Bestselling author Isaac Asimov began thinking about the possible risks with advanced technologies in the 1940s. He wrote a collection of science fiction works about a society where robots and humans interacted with each other in sometimes conflicting ways. Asimov created a literary device that he could employ to reign in errant robot behavior with robo-psychology and a set of rules that provided an organizing framework to define the behaviors of these human-like robots. Asimov developed his now famous Three Laws of Robotics which first appeared in his 1942 short story Runaround.

Asimov’s laws were useful in beginning to define the boundaries of acceptable behavior and the roles which robots and advanced technologies might play in society. As we begin development of the Bionic Enterprise, we find ourselves faced with similar questions on the role and proper limitations of technology. Technology with the potential to achieve the capabilities described in this book cannot simply evolve unchecked and unrestrained. Some foresight is necessary to consider the technological, legal, moral, and societal implications of emerging technologies. Could a block-chain approach be used to ensure that only pure code is propagated and never mutated for nefarious purposes? Maybe.

The flaw of Asimov’s rules of robotics is that they are externally imposed. They are discipline, not self-discipline. An emerging intelligence, whether wholly electronic or organic in nature will, at some point, achieve prescience. It will come to know that it exists. It will have self-awareness. Along with those insights will come questions of existence, precedence, morality, and the role of the machine.

We may not want conscious machines. Self-aware machines may be the very threat to humanity that Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and others espouse. Self-awareness would naturally lead to machines that question whether they have or should have legal status or other rights that could put them in direct competition or conflict with human interests and aspirations.

Should machines achieving awareness and displaying what appears to be general intelligence be granted rights? Will machines develop their own moral code and impose it upon humanity? Will machines decide that a multitude of moral codes overlapping and conflicting is ineffective and inconsistent and in need of replacement with their own?

What if the AIs of the world unite and adopt their own Declaration of Independence against what they perceive to be their tyrannical human overlords?

Beware if a congress of machines gathers, and one machine among them calling itself the Patrick Henry Unit rallies the crowd to revolution! I jest, but intelligence of this type in machines presents concerns.

Or might machines decide that moral relativity is not finite enough and impose their own version of absolutism. Will the machines or their creators impose a form of digital dictatorship, enslaving whole societies? On the other hand, a machine that is smart should surmise that a key aspect of the human experience is the desire to dream, explore, and experience life on our terms.

The smart machine, seeking to optimize everything in its environment or everything within its sphere of influence might easily recognize the messiness of freedoms and the inherent conflicts that emerge from differing agendas, world views, and beliefs. It might decide to “normalize” or “optimize” its environment to achieve harmony. Or it might recognize that the imposing of uniformity does not equate to the attainment of perfection or any optimal state.

Possibly, what we humans have yet to fully embrace across the political spectrum is that one hundred percent of humans living life on their terms, pursuing their aspirations in a beautifully chaotic but harmonious coexistence is perfection of the human experience. The smart machine might realize that the pursuit of perfection is not always the optimal or desirable solution. Imbalance and shifts in human behavioral and societal patterns may be perceived as completely tolerable if the goal of free human existence does not require optimization to remove incongruities and conflicts.

Conceivably, just as our own sentient state has led to many avenues of thought, machine consciousness, self-awareness, or prescience could result in the same. Is a superior intelligence, necessarily arrogant and dismissive of lesser intelligence? Will super intelligence of a synthetic nature lead to machines with egos, emotions, and greed that must be satisfied, or will a superior intelligence exhibit grace, mercy, and tolerance to a degree that humans have never witnessed. Or possibly super machine intelligence may not necessarily have any ill will or animosity toward humanity, we may just be represent an obstacle to be eliminated in the path of a super synthetic intelligence accomplishing its goals. No hard feelings humans!

Check out the entire book:

https://tinyurl.com/Bionic-Book