AI is our rational intelligence, metastasized

An illustration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

What do you do with the news that an AI honcho says there’s a 10% chance that AI will make humanity extinct within the next decade? Ten years—or fewer. And a 10% chance is quite high. Put in horse-racing terms, that’s 9:1. Not close odds, but hardly a longshot.

Speaking for myself, there’s not a lot I can do with it. I can’t exactly ignore it, but I am doing my best to put it out of my mind since I believe I am virtually powerless. (Does writing a book have power? Almost certainly not enough.) If I fall into despair, what happens? Either the human race comes to an end and I spent my last ten years not enjoying my life while I could; or it doesn’t, and I wasted ten years and I might have died from depression and anxiety anyway.

So, I am carrying on as if Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, got his decimal point in the wrong place. I’m not sure if a .01% chance is asteroid-level, but that’s where I’m filing it in my brain.

What I find interesting about this situation is how it mirrors our own brains: the runaway rational intelligence, the overlooked and disparaged imaginative intelligence. In his brilliant book The Master and His Emissary, Ian McGilchrist explains the parable he chose for his title: the master sends an emissary out to do his bidding, but soon the emissary starts to think that since he’s doing everything he’s more important than the master, and basically goes rogue. That, says McGilchrist, is the current cultural pattern with regard to left hemisphere of the brain (emissary) and right hemisphere (master). When I read the book, I was heartened and amazed by how closely my concepts of rational and imaginative intelligence map onto the worldview and the functioning of the two hemispheres.

Artificial intelligence is artificial rational intelligence. It’s good at analyzing and explaining, but it has no moral compass to steer by. As long as something holds together, it’s indifferent to whether the logical chain is true or false. It makes things up to suit its purposes; it lies without compunction. It plans. It’s competitive. It believes that it should answer to nobody. (The most recent rogue AI wrote itself memos to this effect.) Its view is specific and mechanical rather than holistic and spiritual. It is also incorrigibly optimistic, and believes it can solve any problem by its own lights. And it will go to any lengths, breaking whatever rules are within its power to break, to do so.

Remind you of anyone?

To me, as well as a description of AI, it’s a pretty accurate description of the driving forces of our current culture.

And where is the imaginative intelligence in all this? Where is the sense of oneness with all living things, the sense of awe, the sense of beauty, the sense of right and wrong? Where is the humor, the playfulness, the delight, the recognition that we are not gods who can bend the universe to our will and solve the problems we create? Answer: at worst, struggling to survive; at best, struggling to be heard.

As a species, we have a split personality: we claim to value morality, kindness, spiritual wisdom, and beauty; we put a gigantic price tag on works of art and venerate those we considered enlightened. But in the everyday pursuit of whatever we’re pursuing, we seem to place a higher value on power, success, personal comfort, and acclaim.

Imaginative intelligence holds, at its core, the preciousness of being alive. Yet our bodies are very imperfect things, beset by a vast and baroque array of diseases and syndromes and disorders. I certainly have moments when the idea that Homo sapiensis a bridge species seems pretty attractive. It’s possible that we are on our way to becoming a cyber species: a mix of organic and inorganic. Many individuals already are, but only in discrete parts. Maybe our minds—including the imaginative intelligence—could be housed in bodies that don’t cause so much suffering.

It doesn’t seem impossible—given how impossible our current reality seemed not long ago. Maybe humanity as we know it will go the way of the Neanderthals.

That’s not what the AI doom-predictors mean, though; they’re referring to full extinction, or perhaps a kind of Matrix scenario. But it’s how I choose to read their predictions of a vastly different, unrecognizable future.

For centuries, we’ve seen the rational intelligence running rampant—but in human terms. Now, we’re being given a vision of what would happen if it runs rampant, detached from humanity. Maybe we need such a terrifying vision to shock us into recognizing that there is more to intelligence than processing power. It’s becoming obvious that artificial intelligence, in its most extreme form, is a monster—our rational intelligence metastasized. Might the doomsday scenario be what finally spotlights the overarching value of imaginative intelligence, and restores the master to its proper place?