A front page story in today’s New York Time frets over the absence of laws regulating artificial intelligence. But as with the vast majority of imperfections, any cure would be vastly worse than the disease.
Teaching reading and math skills could lead to a mastery of quantum mechanics and assistance in manufacturing a nuclear weapon. Should reading or math be forbidden to prevent a nuclear holocaust?
Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries might provoke a reader to copycat the plot. Should her books be banned?
A knife can be used to cut bread or to stab a person to death. Should knives be banned to eliminate their potential as murder weapons.?
Knowledge is power and can be employed for evil purposes. Should knowledge be prohibited to pretermit the evil?
Humans are creatures of habit and characteristically take alarm at anything novel, including artificial intelligence. In 1965, the Israeli government boycotted the Beatles because of their putative threat to the Israeli youth culture.
Artificial intelligence like all intelligence can be used for nefarious purposes. But the enlightened response is to prohibit or regulate the abuses, not to suppress new learning. No one is endowed with the prescience to foresee all the positive and negative ramifications of new knowledge and the wisdom to know what areas of intelligence would be better left unexplored.
We roll the dice with intelligence because the opposite would keep the species subsisting in miserable darkness. As atomic scientist James B. Conant reportedly observed: “Behold the turtle! It makes progress only when his neck is out.” Or as John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty: “A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”
Intelligence is neither good nor evil. Only humans are.
We need a state large & wise enough to control corporations. We are living in the nightmare Teddy Roosevelt warned us about. Our regulatory agencies have been taken over by the industries they were created to police. The result is corporations replace science with propaganda and they install and own the gatekeepers. They employee legions of lobbyists and they own politicians by the legalized bribery called lobbying.
We need an emergency use authorization for guillotines.