Social Considerations for Artificial

Social Considerations for Artificial Intelligence
By Noel Anthony Pierre

According to Dennis Gorelik, a single perceived weakness of an AIS (meaning, an artificial intelligence society, consisting of computers trained to 'think') is that it was not born through natural selection as human beings are. But one could view whether this is a disadvantage or an advantage from a couple of sides. Within human natural selection, there are biases based on upbringing, genetic factors and how ultimately one responds to social events. For example, if one came from a violent past/childhood and ended up being a psychopath, this could override any INTELLECTUAL, socially beneficial learning that this person ultimately gets. It can cause them to make decisions based not on logic, but by their own emotional biases.

With strong AI, this factor is at least on paper removed on a grand, world-based scale, with the Machine being the sum of all par7ts, all people connected. In WIRED magazine’s new issue, for example, writer Kevin Kelly describes the internet’s home for AI as being a breeding ground for a single consciousness by billions of people and situations. So, while in a individually controlled AI environment, the AIS might by function – or by purposeful ‘programming’ – take on the biases of an INDIVIDUAL user, within the framework of mass contributions, it becomes a gigantic collector of information. I imagine that the ideal, if AIS is to work for human advantage, is that the emotional side of the Machine would take on so-called ‘normal’ emotional states of the people and systems it serves. People do not wish to be abused or stolen from or killed en masse.

In short, natural selection is a hit-or-miss thing on purely intellectual and emotional basises. “Love is blind,” “there’s no accounting for SOME people,” “There’s a sucker born every minute,” etc. With the large amount of data an AIS civilization would collect, there would in theory be a checks-and-balances library for more and more questionable, dubious, socially detrimental things, regardless of the user. It would become a servant to the population – not to any one particular group, person or thing.