Knowledge is neither moral nor immoral. Knowledge can be used for benign or malign ends. It can be employed to advance the cause of justice. It can be used to enhance proficiency in industrial-scale first-degree murder. It all depends on the motivation of the user.
Wouldn’t it be a cure vastly worse than the disease to prohibit the acquisition of knowledge to eliminate the risk of misuse? It would guarantee a pandemic of idiocracies and a regression to the pre-Stone Age.
Elon Musk and other professed technology leaders proposed something comparable yesterday in braying for an indefinite moratorium on AI advances in a letter released by the Future of Life Institute. The high-tech gurus bemoaned the obvious and inevitable, i.e., that AI can be devoted to benevolent or wicked purposes. True enough. But no one is blessed with the foresight to predict which will predominate. When Lord Rutherford split the atom in 1917, who foresaw Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a proliferation of nuclear weapons risking species extinction?
The self-credentialed technology wizards argued that development of next generation AI systems should proceed “only once we are confidant that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” But who has the wisdom to judge? Both potential positive and negative effects of future generation AI are infinite. To weigh an infinite number of positives against an infinite number of negatives would be a task of infinite duration. It is not a task for mere mortal like homo sapiens.
Additionally, AI advances at warp speed. Defining the next generation with workable exactitude is impossible.
Further, who has the authority to identify and weigh the potential positives and negatives in future generations of AI? You? Me? The signatories to the letter? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects freedom of inquiry. An index of forbidden books or ideas in the manner of the Pope’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum would constitutionally off limits. The United States Government cannot step in—even it knew how, which it obviously does not. Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch are dominated by AI, cyberspace, digital age neophytes.
The optimal approach to defeating the potential for malevolent use of AI is by inculcating wisdom and moral philosophy in the public at large—a veneration of the thinker over the armored knight. Socrates showed us the way. All we need to do is follows his courageous example without even risking the hemlock.