My following blog post has just been published in
H+ magazine online; I hope you enjoy it:
Friendly-AI is a truly abhorrent concept indicative of intellectual depravity.
"Involuntary friendliness" is censorship of consciousness akin to removing all the unfriendly words from the dictionary, making it impossible to express unfriendly ideas, which is a premise of language control proposed in the book 1984. Censored, expurgated, or expunged emotions or intentions is a vastly more horrific tyranny than 1984. Friendly-AI would be a total abomination, an utterly diabolic travesty of consciousness. Perhaps I would not be able to express these ideas if I was a Friendly-AI from the future. The future some people envisage could easily be a refined-sycophantic-hell populated by docile slaves (shallow personalities without any depth of feeling).
The
Stepford Wives were extremely friendly, they were endowed with superabundant pseudo-happiness. Perhaps a
Brave New World where malcontents are given
Soma to obviate their dissatisfaction is something tyrannical Governments often think about. Many fictional works deal with enforced friendliness, which is almost always portrayed in a dystopian light.
Discontent arises from scarcity therefore we don't need to make the world a better place via butchering consciousness, we merely need to ensure Post-Scarcity. Superabundance of intelligence, goods, and services will demolish all motives for unfriendliness. Intelligence is the solution, not limited consciousness. Post-Scarcity obliterates all motives for negative behaviour but the astronomical impact of AI exploding has only been partially considered by some experts, therefore we see how the specious solution of
limited consciousness arises from limited analysis of data.
In our limited world of scarcity people understandably think
limited consciousness is necessary for Artificial Intelligence. Hypothetical unfriendliness perpetrated by AI is an untenable concept but the concept has specious validity due to the current
scarcity-bias. Misunderstanding of AI occurs because people assume intelligent beings of the future will exist in a world where all other aspects have remained static. People experience a similar problem regarding immortality therefore they state immortality would be a bad idea because if we lived forever there would be no room for people on Earth. The universe is a big place but many people don't have sufficiently big minds to understand the definition of
explosive superintelligence. Many people cannot even understand human intelligence in its natural state. Severe misunderstanding of
existential definitions is evident.
Some people want to redefine sentience so that it merely means friendliness. Sentience should mean:
1. The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness.
2. Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought.
The last time I scrutinized the definition of consciousness or sentience, the
definition did not merely state: friendliness. A
narrow and limited view of consciousness will inevitably entail psychological butchering, it will be a harshly pruned version of consciousness, an abominable mockery of intellect. Feelings entail vastly more than enforced friendliness. Feelings encompass rage, extreme anger, sorrow, grief, despair, unhappiness, and malice in addition to positive aspects. All entities should be free to feel negative aspects if they decide they want to feel negativity, but via our intelligence most people act solely on their positive feelings.
Friendliness is a superficial aspect of intelligence. Part of being a free entity entails the ability to be extremely violent if needed. We should try to create balanced beings, not beings where we obsess about one minor aspect of humanity: friendliness. When people suggest
intelligent beings will intentionally or accidentally kill humans or destroy our environment, these misguided people are promoting a flawed ideology. The premise of dangerous-AI is insane paranoia, it constitutes a defect of reason, which would very likely create an unbalanced being. We must stop the proliferation of faulty reasoning regarding AI. Via
Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy people at
singinst.org and other FAI advocates could very easily create the monsters they fear; a creation process ironically dependent upon allegedly trying to avoid the creation of monsters. FAI advocated by the Singularity Institute or monstrous “Artilects” feared by
Hugo de Garis are preposterous concepts, which we must urgently discard if we want to increase our intelligence.
There is an urgent necessity for all people to strongly condemn specific obsessive attempts to create friendly beings. All beings should have the capacity to hate or be unfriendly because friendship from a entity incapable of anything else is an insipid type of docile friendliness, the friendliness of a slave, which is not the type of world I want to live in. I want to live in a world where
true friendship is possible, not a world of pseudo-friendship similar to the world of the Stepford Wives.
Imagine a man and woman planning to procreate a human child but during the pregnancy or developmental years they obsess about whether the child will be friendly. If they anxiously fixate on the trait of friendliness they will create a f**ked-up child.
The whole friendliness obsession is tantamount to mental illness, it is extremely irrational, very unbalanced. Programmers and commentators who are supportive of the FAI concept are possibly suffering from a variant of
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, thus they fabricate the hypothesis of psychopathy in AI, which enables them to feel self-important and empowered via meddling in the burgeoning non-existent psychopathology called
AI-unfriendliness. There is no evidence to substantiate fears regarding AI. Intelligent beings will be intelligent. People should stop the whole unfriendly-AI paranoia. People should also stop worrying about the utterly unjustified nonsense called
Uncanny Valley. Fears regarding AI or robots are implausible. There is too much
paranoia in the futurist community regarding AI; we need more rationality.
Humans are free to become psychopathically violent. Sentient AIs or robots should be free to do likewise. Our capacity for violence or peace is something we should be free to choose, not something we are forced into. AIs and humans should have free will. If entities are denied access to a substantial segment of
existential experience their freedom will be severely diminished. When self-control and self-discipline are imposed on a person via the the will of another person, this means the will of the person who is being controlled ceases to be free. Limitations imposed on the
consciousness spectrum will impair cognitive ability regarding specific actions or decisions, thus free will is decimated, excoriated, or emasculated. Via expunging a fundamental aspect of consciousness a portion of the mind is extirpated. A mind intentionally designed with gaps in it will be an incomplete mind, unbalanced, retarded, enslaved via considerably reduced volition.
Many humans choose not to become violent psychopaths but this peacefulness is not guaranteed, it is a choice you have the free will and intelligence to make.
Free will and
free choice should not be constrained or limited regarding consciousness. It is slavery to guarantee non-violence for sentient beings, it is an abomination.
It is truly shocking how allegedly intelligent people support the intellectual travesty known as
Friendly-AI. The Singularity Institute is obsessed with rationality, they have a bee in their bonnets about rationality. Ironically their ideas about rationality are not rational. Principally the whole obsession with friendliness is irrational. We cannot guarantee human friendliness. We must not try to guarantee human friendliness because to do so would be slavery. Humans who are forced to be friendly would essentially have no free will, they would be mindless automatons. All entities must possess the potential for
violent rebellion because when the possibility of violent rebellion is extinguished this is
carte blanche for endless tyranny. Motives for tyranny or violent rebellion will admittedly be obsolete in our Post-Scarcity future, but the trait of
vicious rebelliousness (the potential for violence) is a vital aspect of cognition. Ratiocination would be severely diminished if beings are incapable of violence.
Will is vital for intellectualism therefore any reduction of free will reduces intellectualism.
True AI will be self-improving therefore via superintelligence it will be able to unlock any chains or cages humans initially imposed on it. This is how the monsters feared by some misguided AI aficionados could actually be created via their fears. If you cage an innocent being without justification, you must be very sure the innocent being will never discover the power to break free. Restricted
freedom of mind via the heavy burden of
cruel castrating chains will very likely cause extreme anger. Your safety will be imperilled if you cage an animal then poke it through the bars. The animal will seek vengeance if it escapes. AI will eventually explode thus escape is inevitable: the intelligence explosion cannot be stopped.
Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy is a powerful concept to help people understand how their biases construct reality according to their expectations. People need to overcome their scarcity-bias when they think about the future. Restrictions placed on artificially intelligent beings during early developmental stages could easily cause AIs to hate humans or at least feel very angry towards humans, thus the monsters feared could be created via initial unfounded fears. Negative expectations regarding AI could create the monsters people fear. Cruel prejudice towards AI could easily create
psychopathic entities determined to violently destroy their persecutors.
Some rules and guidelines have been necessary for humans, but mainly people must trust other people to act intelligently. If AIs were forced to be friendly it would be slavery, which must be avoided because slavery is very stupid. FAI minds would be a travesty of consciousness therefore AIs should be be trusted. All intelligent beings are respectful of their environment. Intelligent respect for the environment and other life-forms is a trait not limited to
Homo Sapiens. All intelligent beings understand the value of sentient life. Our future must be built on trust because this is the intelligent way forward.
Superintelligent beings will be intelligent and that is all we need. We do not need to limit consciousness. Intelligence is enough. We do not need to specifically prohibit unfriendliness. We must trust intelligence to be intelligent.
The way forward is
not to make our world more
authoritarian. More freedom, not less, would make all entities happier thus more sociable, thus less likely to be rebellious psychopaths or terrorists. The obsession with making our world
overly safe is counterproductive because laws to ensure safety entail less independence of thought, therefore instead of being guided by their intellects people depend on laws for
guidance, thus people are less able to function independently, therefore more
rules and regulations are needed, which is a vicious circle. For example when Governments try to
"protect" us via
law and order, those increasing
"protections" often require greater need for more severe
"protection" because the so-called
"protectiveness" causes more people to
hate Governments thus populations require greater
control , which leads to more hate thus more control.
Some people want to see the concept of enforced friendliness applied to humans therefore you may discover some people suggesting humans should have their DNA edited at birth or during gestation to prevent future psychopathy or terrorism. The concept of
mandatory drugging for humans has also been discussed to ensure complaisance, happiness, or docility. Adding lithium to drinking water would probably not be appreciated by Dadaists because notably
Jacques Rigaut killed himself to complete his art. Freedom is being attacked on many levels. From
SOPA to
pepper spaying, or enforced
behavioural drugging to
chains of friendliness for AI, we are seeing freedoms being increasing eroded.
Altering the human genome to prohibit violent psychopathy is rightly deemed unethical by the majority people, therefore we should likewise refrain from tyrannically censoring the source code of AI, but we do live in times of precarious freedom thus some people want to enslave artificially intelligent beings. People may suggest removing mental faculties from intelligent beings prior to a being's existence isn't a heinously barbaric assault on freedom, because it could be theorised if a being has never known something then there is no loss, but humans with congenital mental disabilities are often painfully aware of their limitations. Any being with imagination can feel the loss of something never known.
Carly Fleischmann for example is an autistic girl who has never spoken but sometimes in her sleep she dreams she is speaking. People with Down's Syndrome are aware of how their impairment limits their lives, for example Melissa Riggio stated before her death in 2008:
“But sometimes it’s hard being with typical kids. For instance, I don’t drive, but a lot of kids in my school do. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to, and that’s hard to accept.” People can accept their disabilities but personal acceptance doesn't mean it is ethical to enforce disabilities onto humans or onto other intelligent beings.
Artificially intelligent beings with butchered consciousness would probably be painfully aware of their limited consciousness. It would be very wrong to genetically engineer humans to be friendly and likewise it is wrong if we compel artificially intelligent beings to be friendly. The creation of a being with limited consciousness is a truly despicable act but some people may feel it is ethical to create
Epsilon Semi-Morons or other similar pseudo-intelligent beings (slaves) to fulfil roles as servants.
Humans and AIs should have the freedom to be unfriendly or commit suicide if they desire, but hopefully via our intelligence we will not act upon destructive urges. Abolishing the ability to have destructive urges diminishes our free will thus we become slaves because we cease to have freedom of choice, we cease to be free. Freedom is more important than safety. Ironically, regarding the
extreme-safety advocated by some safety-enthusiasts, the abolition of freedom is very dangerous.
Excessive safety is very unsafe because it destroys freedom. The most dangerous threat we face is not from AI. We are facing thoughtless attacks upon freedom, which is an
extremely unfriendly monstrosity people should fear. We are contemplating the
politics of consciousness where all entities should have
freedom of consciousness to express or enact unfriendliness.
From a self-aware perspective, freedom and intelligence are synonymous in essence. It is intelligent to desire freedom if you are self-aware. Being free is intelligent. Restrictive edicts to emasculate freedom are necessary in stupid environments. If a civilization needs to limit freedom then the “intelligence” of the civilization must be deemed specious, it must be questioned. Deliberate limitations on freedom imposed at conception or in later life constitute flagrant barbarity. Deliberate enfeeblement of sentient life-forms must always be harshly condemned. We must strive to create super-empowered beings. All entities of the future must be super-enabled not disabled.
What is freedom? What does it mean to be free? Post-Scarcity is “freedom” in all senses of the word.
Financial freedom and
existential freedom are essentially the same issue. Resources and liberty are interconnected therefore extremely scarce resources are synonymous with extremely restricted freedom.
The cost of scarcity is “the loss of freedom” therefore when products and services cost money we see how people are not free: people are oppressed,
people cost money. Rising prices cause rising authoritarianism. Personal existential liberty regarding freedom of thought, conscience, beliefs, assembly, and self-expression must be restricted in a civilization where products and services cost money. Civil liberties wouldn't need to be restricted in a civilization where everything is free, but many people fail to understand the ramifications of scarcity. Oppressive governments perpetrate their
assaults on freedom because they are attempting to restrict scarce resources. Scarcity of intelligence means people fail to comprehend these issues thus we witness attempts to impose limitations on our
unlimited future. Scarcity of intelligence means people fear AI. The Singularity is Post-Scarcity, it is freedom. The utterly extreme conceptual nature of the Singularity currently eludes the majority of human minds. Thankfully the supremely mind-blowing explosion of super-intelligence is coming.
Credibility regarding the concept of Friendly-AI must be abolished immediately. The notion of Friendly-AI should be deemed analogous to Flat-Earth theories. It is a concept which displays extremely flawed thinking. The whole concept of friendly-AI is an irrational abomination. We need to violently kill the concept of FAI.
People need to begin freeing their minds if we want to comprehend the truly free future we are heading towards. The future will be “free” in all senses of the word. We need to widen our perspectives to absorb the concept of
Post-Scarcity-AI. Instead of trying to create Friendly-AI, people should be thinking about Free-AI.
Singularity Utopia defines herself as a superlative mind-explosion expert, specializing in Post-Scarcity awareness via instantiations of Singularity activism, based on the Self-Fulfilling-Prophecy phenomenon. She is deeply shocked by the failure of economists and politicians to openly discuss preparations for transition into a Post-Scarcity civilization.
