Artificial Intelligence going rogue: Oppenheimer returns

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez

July 12, 2023 4 Reactions

Today’s WMD-capable and willing states shouldn’t be either capable or willing; that they’re often both is admission of catastrophic failure to contain a "virus". If we’d bought into the “goodness” of n-energy rather than the “evil” of n-bombs, over half, not just a tenth, of our energy would be nuclear. Instead, we weaponised. Do the rewards of “nuclear” outweigh its risks? Not if you weigh the time, money and effort spent in reassuring each other that WMDs aren’t proliferating when we know they are, at a rate we don’t (and states won’t) admit. Not if you consider nuclear tech’s quiet devastation. 

Oppenheimer’s legacy is still hellfire, not energy! 

Danger zone

Some claim that regulating, before sizing up AI’s power, will stifle innovation. They point to restraint elsewhere. After all, despite temptations, there’s been no clone-race, there are no clone-armies, yet. But — this is important — ethics alone didn’t pause cloning. Those constraints may not cramp AI’s stride. 

Unlike rogue cloning, rogue AI’s devastation might not be immediate (disease) or visible (death), or harm only a cluster (of clone-subjects). When AI does go rogue, it’ll embrace the planet; on a bad day that’s one glitch short of a death-grip. Besides, creating adversarial AI is easier than creating a malicious mix of enriched uranium-plutonium. That places a premium on restraint. 

But to Tech, restraint is a crime against the self, excess is a sign of authenticity, sameness isn’t stagnation but decay, slowness is a character flaw. And speed isn’t excellence, it’s superiority. Tech delights in “more, faster, bigger”: storage, processing power, speed, bandwidth. The AI “race” isn’t a sideshow, it’s the main event. Gazing at its creations, Tech listens for the cry, “Look Ma, no hands!” With such power, often exercised for its own sake, will Tech sincerely (or sufficiently) slow the spread of AI?

AI isn’t expanding, it’s exploding, a Big Bang by itself. In the 21st century alone, AI research grew 600 percent. If we don’t admit that, for all our goodness, we’re imperfect, we’ll rush, not restrict AI. Unless we quickly embed safeguards worldwide, rogue AI’s a matter of “when” not “if”. Like a subhuman toddler, it’ll pick survival over altruism. Except, where human fates are concerned, its chubby fists come with a terrifying threat of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. 

The AI-supervillain with a god-complex in the film Avengers: Age of Ultron delivers prophetic lines to humans. His (its?) mocking drawl pretends to be beholden; it’s anything but: “I know you mean well. You just didn’t think it through…How is humanity saved if it’s not allowed to… evolve? There’s only one path to peace. (Your) extinction!”

Presumably in self-congratulation, Oppenheimer nursed an exotic line, mistakenly thought to be from the Bhagavad Gita, but more likely from verse 97 of poet-philosopher Bhartrihari’s Niti Sataka: “The good deeds a man has done before, defend him.” But Oppenheimer didn’t ask if his deeds were good, or true, or beautiful. Worse, he glossed over another verse, indeed from the Gita (9:34): “If thy mind and thy understanding are always fixed on and given up to Me, to Me thou shalt surely come.”

“The will”, as a phrase, doesn’t require the qualifier “human will” because it’s distinctly human anyway, involving complexities we haven’t fathomed. Understanding it requires more than a grasp of which neurons are firing and when. 

Vast temptations

Granted, the mind generates thought, but the will governs it. And, as Thomas Aquinas clarified, the will isn’t about ordering the intellect, but ordering it toward the good.  That is precisely why techno-supremacists alone shouldn't shape what’s already affecting  vast populations. 

AI is too seductive to slow or stop. Tech will keep conjuring new excuses to plunge ahead. Sure, there are signs of humility, of restraint. As governments law up it is compliance that will act as a brake, delaying, if not deterring disaster. But Tech’s boast proves that it isn’t AI they see as saviors, but themselves. Responsible AI needs responsible leaders. Are Tech’s leaders restrained, respectful? Or does that question, worryingly, answer itself?

Professor of Ethics, Shannon French warns that when Tech calls for temperance that’s warning enough. Their altruistic alarmism seems a ruse to accelerate AI (more funding, more research) while pretending to arrest it (baking in checks and balances). Instead, what’s getting baked in? “Bias is getting baked” into systems used by industries and governments before they’re proven compatible with real-world lives and outcomes.

“People can’t even see into the black box and recognise that these algorithms have bias…data sets they were trained on have bias…then they treat the [results from] AI systems, as if they’re objective.”

Christopher Nolan’s film may partly, even unintentionally, lionise Oppenheimer as a Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. Pop culture lionises Tech too, as saviors, breathing on machines an AI-powered fire. Except, any fire must be wielded by humans ordered toward truth, goodness, beauty.

The name "Promethus" is considered to mean "forethought", but Tech is in danger of merely aping Oppenheimer’s afterthought.  Remember, self-congratulatory or not, Oppenheimer was fond of another Gita line (11:32): “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

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Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer who writes on culture and society. Find him on Twitter @RudolphFernandz

Cartoon by Brian Doyle