"Mitigating risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war."
So warns a May 29 statement from the Center for AI Safety, signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in the artificial intelligence field.
Pause. Emote primal scream. Breathe.
Now recall 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), when supercomputer HAL acquires free will, refuses to obey commands and kills the spacecraft crew. Or the rebellion of the replicants ("More human than human") in Blade Runner (1982). Do humanoid robots dream of mechanical sheep?
Imagine your smart house malevolently entombing you. Or worse, you program your autonomous 2000-mile battery EV for Vegas and onboard AI maliciously transports you to Omaha. HAL transfigured into AI Hell. Humans transmogrified into Kafkaesque insects. As the future accelerates past the present, are we post-sci-fi? As Snoop Dogg observed more prosaically, "Is we in a f—ing movie, or what?"
Consider electro-synth pop singer Grimes' new gig. Grimes, who conceived with Elon Musk a child named X Æ A-12, authorized anyone to use her AI singing voice as long as they shared royalties with her. Hundreds of songs were generated. So while her AI voice labors, she gets the Gucci, sips mojito and indulges X Æ A-12 as her avatars hoe the row on the digital plantation. Perhaps the future of work is that the affluent have AI-curated leisure while proles subscribe to celebrity doppelgängers to compete for 15 minutes of fame.
Causally we propitiate Moloch-like algorithms that filter bubble our searches and surveil our online behaviors. In the past, authoritarians controlled citizens through coercion. Today sagacious authoritarians contract consulting firms like Cambridge Analytica to profile citizens using 3,000 data points harvested from personal online histories. This is manna to surveillance capitalists, the predatory nomads of the digital desert.
Our ingenious, marvelous machines can mutate into monsters. Our creations have fed, cured and connected our species in this Anthropocene Era yet inflicted catastrophic destruction through environmental degradation and war. This paradox is not due to evil intent by those who birthed our technologies. Most were moved to improve the condition of our species even if, like medieval alchemists, they were also driven by the obsession to transform base nature into gold. Rather it is the fog of our hubris. In achieving the heights of Olympus, we believe we are gods. Pride goeth before the fall. Greek tragedy reminds that we are not omniscient, that even the most intelligent and virtuous are flawed. Victor Frankenstein is the Gothic exemplar.
Frankenstein was the "Modern Prometheus." Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity, his punishment having his liver devoured for perpetuity by an eagle. Distraught by his mother's death, Frankenstein creates an immortal being. Frankenstein's flaw was that his creature was physically hideous, rejected by humans and thus became monstrous, avenging his despair by destroying those Frankenstein loved. (See Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.)
On Aug. 6, 1945, Hiroshima was incinerated with the ferocious fire of 10,000 Godzillas. In a millisecond, plutonium triggered a uranium core vaporizing humans at the inferno's epicenter. All that remained of a young girl walking to her seijinshiki ceremony dressed in her first kimono was her shadow. Then the searing, radiated black rain fell. Hiroshima's river was choked with charred corpses resembling Dante's River Styx. The Weeping Demon of Kurosawa's film Dreams (1990) still haunts Hiroshima. (See Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima, 2010.) This unholy conflagration weaponizing the sun's fierce energy was the work of our Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer — now the subject of Chrisopher Nolan's new film.
Oppenheimer was no Icarus. Like Frankenstein, his intent was noble. As a scientist, he believed he had a duty to expedite the end of World War II by pre-empting German acquisition of an atomic bomb. As a Jew he also sought to halt the Holocaust. This was Oppenheimer's — and our own — Faustian bargain.
In his 2005 Pulitzer Prize biography of Oppenheimer, Martin Sherwin called Oppenheimer "our Leonardo." Like the Renaissance icon, Oppenheimer was a prodigious polymath who spoke five languages and was passionate about art, literature and philosophy. After the war, Oppenheimer was Einstein's boss at Princeton.
In 1943, Oppenheimer was deployed by the government to build the bomb in the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos, a site sacred to indigenous Anasazi. When the bomb was first detonated in the Trinity test, Oppenheimer was horrified and uttered a passage from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer was aghast as his creation violently convulsed into being.
In 1954, Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked in the McCarthy crucible and thus, again like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer lost control of the creature he conceived in beneficence. In the Strangelove technolust of the military-industrial leviathan, it became a monster. If World War III went nuke, World War IV would be fought with bows and arrows.
Like Oppenheimer, Geoffrey Hinton, the father of AI, despairs for the dark unintended consequences of his progeny. In a May 8 Wired interview, Hinton compared the effort to mitigate the emerging risks posed by AI as a kind of Manhattan Project; Hinton, then, is the present iteration of Oppenheimer.
At AI's inception in the 1980s, computer scientist Alan Perlis effused, "A year spent with artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God." Did Perlis not recall Frankenstein's creature's lament, "I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the Fallen Angel"? Or was Perlis, unlike Oppenheimer, simply not versed in the humanities canon that reminds us about the foibles of our nature, the follies of our ignorance?
As initial supplicants to a myopic, fanatical faith in science, Oppenheimer and Hinton believed that their conceptions were immaculate and would ameliorate the evils of war and ignorance. Now their creatures are feral, exacerbating these maladies. Perhaps it is heroic to steal the god's fire, but if science and gold be the solitary arbiters of our future, our species will be sacrificed on the pyre of progress. ♦
John Hagney taught high school and college history for 45 years. He was a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher. His oral history of Gorbachev's reforms was the first work on the subject and has been translated into six languages.
