Although I studied electronics for four years in the mid-60s and electrical engineering for a couple of years at the end of that decade, I dropped this career path and decided to devote myself to philosophy, which I did. I worked hard, made it in the academic world, and have been at it ever since with no regrets and great personal satisfaction. Which is to say: my comments on AI are of little objective weight. Not because I am a philosopher, but because I am no longer an engineer. So take my AI comments cum grano salis. But they matter to me and that is what this weblog has been about for the last quarter century: just one man of modest but above-average abilities trying to make sense of himself and the world in which he lives. That, and the attempt to attract a few like-minded individuals to help him along with his self-improvement project.
Last night I watched Mark Levin as I regularly do. He was going on about how capitalism is really just commerce and how AI is part of the commercial expansion of our great nation. But his expectations for AI and all the great jobs it will create struck me as roseate to the point of being pollyannish.
Before voicing my worries and fears, let me say something good about AI. The AI engine Claude in its latest version chewed through a draft of an invited article, and then did the same for the responses I made to its first set of comments. I was impressed! Some of the comments were excellent and inspired reformulations and improvements. The damned thing ‘paid close attention’ to what I what I was saying and zeroed in on real, not imagined, weaknesses — unlike human commenters who typically lack the energy, the focus, and the desire to penetrate the author’s meaning as opposed to taking the occasion to front their own pet views. So these literally selfless advanced AI engines are very useful tools for researchers.
That AIs are literally selfless non-persons is my considered opinion, held tentatively, not dogmatically. A critical thinker, neither a dogmatic affirmer nor a dogmatic denier, I am open to refutation. Thus I do not believe that these contraptions are conscious, self-conscious, or capable of deploying the first-person singular pronoun in such a way as to mean something by its deployment (as opposed to producing a written or spoken token of the sign ‘I’ in the manner of a voice synthesizer). I also deny that AI engines possess intrinsic (as opposed to ascribed) intentionality (object-directedness). I reject Daniel Dennett’s ascriptivist theory of intentionality. AIs also lack moral rights and duties, and in consequence cannot be sensibly ascribed legal rights and duties. Finally, AI engines lack gen-u-ine libertarian free will. (I am willing to grant that AI engines possess pseudo, i.e. compatibilist, free will.)
Now three points.
First, Man the Toolmaker makes tools that re-make him in various ways. The manual laborer with pick and shovel, hammer and crowbar, is altered in obvious physical ways by his use of these simplest of implements. A fortiori for the more advanced tools that re-make man non-physically in their image and likeness. I won’t expatiate further on this theme, partly because I lack the pate to do a really good job of it.
Second, as I mentioned here in the introduction to Claude’s second chew-through of my work, Claude and his ‘colleagues’ present a friendly and helpful face to those who interact with them so that an uncritical and impressionable youngster could easily be seduced into thinking that she is engaging with a friend who, unlike her parents, really understands her. There are obvious dangers here as you can imagine.
Third, and most ominously, the AIs are now so advanced that they can hack each other, form conspiracies, and cause unspeakable mischief with no human guidance or control. But to explain this in any detail is above my paygrade. So read The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations. (HT: Vito Caiati)