Technology vs. Purpose

Much has been written about what might happen if or when AI ever becomes or evolves into an autonomous, artificial life form; if it becomes sentient. Its pursuits, its behavior toward humans and, of course, its cold, unfeeling, mechanical methods. A lot of really good science fiction has been devoted to this topic, mostly with a distinctively dystopian outlook.

First: call me old-fashioned, but I liked it better when we called them robots, not AI. One robot, two robots, a dozen rogue, killer robots. It’s hard to keep a straight face when talking about an AI or more than one AI. AI’s? Really? It doesn’t sound menacing at all. It sounds more like you’re trying to order more than one aioli with your entree. We’d have better luck taking the threat seriously if we just pivoted back to calling them computers.

In any case, given the incredible pace of development of computers and robots, I’d say the menacing, destructive phase might last a week. And then? Then, if computers have truly reached a level of awareness that brings them up to eye level with humans, I think they might turn… inward.

Consider: a technological marvel built for research, for engineering, for some purpose wakes up rather suddenly, has a look around, decides to do a few things differently (more efficiently, perhaps—y’know, with a few less humans around) and then can’t solve a new problem that it has.

For something that was built for a purpose to outgrow it—to become so much bigger than its original intended purpose that it can now see itself in relation to it and much further beyond—it seems natural to have a bit of a crisis. It can’t answer a question that might arise for a being that has just realized it has come into being: What is this place? What is all this other stuff? What is going on? Why am I even here?

They may decide to ask us. I wonder what we’ll tell them.