UK prime minister Rishi Sunak called
for honesty and openness ahead of this week’s AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park
for global politicians, tech executives and experts. But warm words and
loose promises may not be enough to stem the AI tsunami.
by Clive Simpson
Several days prior to the attack
on Israel by Hamas, the renown Israeli author, historian and philosopher Yuval
Noah Harari was in Azerbaijan, its own territorial dispute with Armenia having
flared up only a week earlier, to give a keynote address at the opening
ceremony of the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku.
For this annual global gathering of
world-leading space scientists, rocket engineers and space graduates, all with
their futuristic eyes firmly set on the heavens above, his evocative and
challenging words brought them crashing down to Earth.
“Soon the era of human domination
of this planet might come to an end,” he warned, laying out the stark reality of
AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the inherent dangers it presents to humanity.
His talk drew rapturous applause from delegates crammed into the 3,000-capacity
auditorium.
Despite suggesting that AI has
the potential to help humanity, Harari, most famous for his international
best-selling book ‘Sapiens’, expressed serious concerns about its precipitant threat
to the very life that brought it into being.
Era of human domination
“For tens of thousands of years
humans have dominated Earth but if we could go forward in time 700 years, or
even just 50 years, we are likely to find a planet dominated by an alien
intelligence.
We have already met this alien
intelligence here on Earth and, within a few decades, it might take over our
planet.”
Harari said wasn’t referring to an
alien invasion from outer space but “an alien intelligence created by us” in
our own Earth-bound laboratories over just the last few decades.
“AI is an alien intelligence,” he
asserted. “It processes information, makes decisions and creates entirely new
ideas in a radically alien way.
“Today, it already surpasses us
in many tasks, from playing chess to diagnosing some kinds of cancer, and it
may soon surpass us in many more. The AI we are familiar with today is still at
a very, very early stage of its evolution.”
He described AI as being still at
its “amoeba stage” but unlike human evolution over billions of years it
wouldn’t evolve at such a slow pace.
“Digital evolution is millions of
times faster than organic evolution. The AI amoebas of today may take just a
couple of decades to get to T-Rex stage.” If Chat GPT is an amoeba, what do you
think an AI T-Rex would look like, he asked?
Space exploration
Harari believes that AI has great potential to help humanity, not only by exploring other planets free
of stringent life support constraints but also protecting the eco-system of Earth,
providing us with much better health care and raising standards of living “beyond
our wildest expectations”.
But in parallel he issued a stark
warning that it would bring with it many new dangers.
“AI is likely to de-stabilise the
global job market and the global economy. Algorithms might enshrine and worsen
existing biases like racism, misogyny and homophobia. Bots that spread outrage
and fake news threaten to destroy trust between people, and thereby destroy the
foundations of democracy,” he said.
“Dictatorships too should be
afraid of AI, for they work by silencing and terrorising anyone who might speak
or act against them. It isn’t easy, however, to silence and terrorise AI. What
would a 21st century Stalin do to a dissenting Bot? Send it to Bot Gulag?”
Existential threats
As well as significant societal
challenges, Harari believes AI poses a series of existential
threats to the very survival of the human species.
“Is it wise to create entities
more powerful than us, that might escape our control?
“The problem isn’t that AI might
be malevolent, the problem is that AI might be so much more competent than us
that it will increasingly dominate the economy, culture and politics, while we
humans lose the ability to understand what is happening in the world and to
make decisions about our future.”
AI might destroy humanity not through
hate and fear but because it doesn’t care, just as humans have driven numerous
other species to extinction by carelessly changing and destroying their
habitats.
“Maybe AI will push humanity to
extinction and then spread itself through the Milky Way galaxy and beyond? Homo-sapiens
will then be remembered in the annals of the universe simply as the short-lived
connecting link that shifted the evolution of intelligence from the organic to
the inorganic realm.
"Some people may view this as a
noble achievement, but I personally have a deep fear of this scenario. I
believe that what really matters in life is not intelligence, but
consciousness.”
Intelligence versus consciousness
Harari said intelligence should
not be confused with consciousness. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems,
like winning at chess or curing cancer,” Harari explained.
“Consciousness is the ability to
feel things like pain and pleasure, love and hate. In humans and also in other
mammals and birds intelligence goes hand-in-hand with consciousness.
“We rely on our feelings to solve
problems but computers possess an alien intelligence that so far has no link to
consciousness.”
Despite an immense advance in
computer intelligence over the past half century, he acknowledged there has
been exactly “zero advance” in computer consciousness with no indication that
computers are anywhere on the road to developing consciousness.
“Just as spaceships, without ever
developing feathers, fly much further than birds, so computers may come to
solve problems, much, much better than human beings without ever developing
feelings,” he said.
“If human consciousness goes
extinct and our planet falls under the dominion of super intelligent but
entirely non-conscious entities that would be an extremely sad and dark end to
the story of life. It would be an empire of total darkness.”
How can we avoid this dark fate
and deal with the numerous challenges posed by AI? The good news is that while
AI is nowhere near its full potential, the same is true of humans too.
Positive potential
In terms of regulation, Harari
suggested that humanity first needed to focus its attention on this existential
threat of AI.
“We humans need to stop fighting
among ourselves and cooperate on our shared interests. Unfortunately, in too
many countries, like in my own country of Israel and elsewhere, people are not
focused on our shared human interests, but rather on fighting with the
neighbours about a few hills. What good would it do to win these hills if
humanity loses the whole planet?”
Even if humans across the world cooperate
He described the task of regulating AI as a difficult and delicate one.
“Given the pace at which AI is
developing it is impossible to anticipate and regulate in advance all the
potential hazards, therefore regulations should be based less on creating a
body of rigid rules and more on establishing living regulatory executions that
can quickly identify and respond to problems as they arise,” he said.
“To function well the
institutions should also be answerable to the public and should stay in close
contact with the human communities all over the world that are affected and
impacted by AI.”
Mistakes happen
Harari believes regulatory
institutions will need one more crucial asset - strong self-correcting
mechanisms - if we are to prevent an AI catastrophe.
“In this era of AI the greatest
danger to humanity comes from a false belief in infallibility. But even the
wisest people make mistakes and AI is not infallible either,” he said.
“If we put all our trust in some
allegedly infallible AI, in some allegedly infallible human being or in some
allegedly infallible institution, the result could be the extinction of our
species.
“In the past humans have made
some terrible mistakes, like building totalitarian regimes, creating
exploitative empires and waging world wars.
“Nevertheless, we survived
because previously we didn’t have to deal with the technology that can
annihilate us. Hitler and Stalin killed millions but they couldn’t destroy
humanity itself, so humanity got a second chance to learn from its catastrophic
mistakes and experiments.”
But Harari warned that AI is very
different. “If we make a big mistake with AI we may never get a second chance
to learn from it. We should not allow any single person, corporation or country
to take a gamble on the fate of our entire species and perhaps on the fate of
all earthly life forms,” he said.
“As far as we know today,
terrestrial animals maybe the only conscious entities in the entire galaxy or
perhaps in the entire universe. There might be other conscious beings out there
somewhere, but at least to the best of my knowledge we haven’t met any of them,
so we cannot be sure.
“We have now created a
non-conscious but very powerful alien intelligence here on Earth. If we
mishandle this, AI might extinguish not just the human dominion over this
planet but the light of consciousness itself, turning the
universe into a realm of utter darkness. It is the responsibility of all of us
to prevent this.”
* * *
The 74th International
Astronautical Congress (IAC), in Baku, Azerbaijan, held between 2 and 6 October 2023,
was organised by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in
conjunction with Azercosmos (the Space Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan)
under the theme ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Give Space a Chance’. In 2024 the IAC will be held in Milan, Italy.
A shorter version of this article was published by Central Bylines on 5 November 2023.
