There are just too many problems with AI as a whole. The graphics created that way is not art, nor the words put together, literature. Because all the arts require a human heart and spirit to give them life.
While interesting perhaps, even this application of AI is not without harm, in the form of denying work to human artists, stealing intellectual property, and seduces the general public with something new and shiny. And the arts are the least dark aspect of the technology.
At the intermediate level, wherein the machines are not an existential threat but still have the capacity to harm humans and other life forms. Massive job loss, susceptibility to hacking, viruses, and errors, allowing machines to do the job of humans is a bad idea.
But there is a deeper philosophical reason as well. This planet is the only place in the vast universe that we KNOW has life. We are the result of billions of years of evolution. And we have become so split off from the rest of the biosphere that we have been committing ecocide for the last 60 years.
Humans are mammals. We must eat food, drink water, and breath air. We release waste through urination and defecation. We die and our organic components return to the earth.
We reproduce on a binary system consisting of two gamete types, large and small, egg and sperm. Our young are carried in the womb of the ova producing sex and the infant is nursed at the mammary glands of that sex after birth. These qualities are true of all mammals.
Machines have none of these characteristics. They can outperform us on ever metric except having a human heart and a human spirit. Creating a class of things such as this is madness. The cyborg can and will mimic some of our worst traits, such as bias, but it can never come close to our best traits because they are ineffable.
And who does it serve? Mostly the aristocracy. The first group that benefits are the big corporations creating and promoting the technology. The second group is the one tenth of one percent uber-wealthy class who always benefit the most from any technology.
Just because our overheated technical intelligence is able to create something does not mean it is good. We also created the atomic bomb with our consciousness. Now is not the time to be playing God by creating machines so intelligent that they could end us and possibly all life. We are doing a bang-up job of riding the extinction train all by ourselves.
The natural world, defined as living ecosystems have everything we need to live on earth. Our obsession with machines is destroying that web. Now, in this time of anthropogenic mass extinction, climate disruption, and ecocide, we need to humbly accept ourselves as animals and do what we can to heal the rift with the natural world.
And that leads us to the existential threat. We need the natural world to survive, but an intelligent machine does not. Nor does it have the value system we do. We are already way too dependent on the machines we have. Machines that are, ostensibly under our control.
For example, a computer-controlled power grid goes down during a cold snap and actual breathing humans freeze to death. They, by the millions, have no direct source of heat.
But it goes further. We cannot assume that AI is or will be like Data of the Starship Enterprise. Most of us can envision humans having a reach that exceeds their grasp. Most of us can imagine us making a big mistake with our technology.
I say most because there is a particular type of person, generally a technocrat from the colonizer class, who would replace organic humans with cyborgs modelled after themselves.
They would trade a normal biological life cycle with sexual reproduction, a time on this planet and then death, with immortality as a machine. Machines have no use for living things.
These natural systems were not created for our special benefit. And the biosphere they support evolved over billions of years and contains trillions of species. We have no right to do damage to that web.
Yes,of course nature can get out of balance. It is out of balance now because one species, Homo sapiens, have overbred and overrun the entire planet, and because we have evolved in such a way that we can completely alter the ground we stand upon.
The uber-capitalist wet dream of giving up the physical body completely in favor of uploading our consciousness into machines is no more of an answer than waging a war so total we blow the whole thing up.
We are doing a dangerous dance with extinction, arrived at by investing all our resources into the mechanistic project of which the natural result is AI and VR.
What we need to do is learn how to control ourselves, our arrogance, and our greed. And pull back to ecologically sustainable limits.
We are smart enough to create things that are exceedingly dangerous but not smart enough to control or destroy our creations. It is a slippery slope. One day it’s cute kiddies with big eyes or crones playing poker and the next it’s thermonuclear war or the matrix.
What mechanism is there to prevent this from going too far, whether by design or by accident?
And I am not the only person who thinks so. A whole bunch of smart people more qualified to speak on this than I am agree with me. We need to work on improving our organic intelligence and our behavior a great deal before we start dabbling in creating a race of intelligent machines. And if we succeed in traversing the harsh ecological conditions of the 21st century and survive to live in harmony with all of nature, we will have no need of them.
Here are some images of the natural world.
AI
Beautifully said. Thank you.