The doomsday machines

I read with astonishment a post by my brother about a chain letter that announces the end of the world for this June 6 of this year (6/6/6).

Apart from being an interesting numerical coincidence, what reasons are there to think the world has to end?

The end, courtesy of technology

The truth is that the end of the world has been announced many times, and not only by religious fanatics.

Apocalyptic visions usually announce all sorts of cataclysms, but, as you would expect, in recent times other causes for the end of the world have been added, attributable to technology:

• The end of the world through the use of biochemical weapons

• All-out nuclear war

• Nuclear plants blowing up

• A super machine that creates a vortex, or a black hole

• Global warming and a new ice age

• The rise of artificial intelligences that destroy their creator

This last “threat” gives me the excuse to start an exploration of artificial intelligence.

The fear of the rise of the machines has been discussed in box-office hits like Terminator and The Matrix, and more subtly in “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

When people talk about this vision of the machine rising against its creator, many compare it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s actually not the same thing, since the “creature” is a human brought back to life (well, a human built from the parts of many corpses).

In The Matrix we don’t know what the “machines” look like. We see squid-shaped robots, but those are only “suits” to house artificial intelligences. The artificial intelligences live in the matrix, a virtual world with a physical substrate (hardware), fed by the biochemical energy of millions of human beings.

In Terminator the idea is similar: an artificial intelligence emerges from a military network (Skynet), and this intelligence decides to destroy mankind. To do so it uses robots, known as terminators, but once again, the AIs are somewhere else.

John Connor knows he must destroy Skynet before it takes shape, because getting to Skynet is probably impossible. Neo heads toward a sort of core of the Matrix, because he knows that even if they kill all the squid robots, those aren’t the problem.

The unseen enemies are Artificial Intelligences that live, float, so to speak, in a network or physical substrate. They are programs, in a way, yes, but programs with the ability to learn and to manipulate their environment in order to protect themselves, for example, by building robots.

The robots aren’t the dangerous ones, they are tools. It’s the artificial intelligences that are in command, and they are the dangerous ones.

But, by their nature, they are elusive. In 2001, HAL is eliminated, because its physical substrate is easy to get to. But in The Matrix and Terminator that isn’t possible, and the heroes of those sagas must try to keep them from emerging, in the case of Terminator, or attack the core where they reside, as in The Matrix.

However, John Connor’s strategy is smarter than Neo’s, because John Connor wants to keep Skynet from ever existing, but that produces an interesting paradox: if John Connor destroys Skynet, he will cease to exist. In the case of The Matrix, we know Neo can’t destroy the AIs, that the fight is eternal and will repeat forever, because Neo is, in a way, a mechanism of the matrix itself for reorganizing itself.

Maybe that’s why The Matrix disappoints so much as a trilogy. Because in the end we feel betrayed. We expected a more exciting finale, but they actually lead us to a disappointing ending in which the AIs win. We have seen that only in 2001 does the hero manage to eliminate the threat of the AI. HAL fails to protect itself.

We know that before building an AI we must build lower levels of intelligence, and those rudiments of intelligence are what we have today. These rudiments make up the “instincts” of AIs. Without those basic instincts, which allow the AI to develop, it won’t be possible for it to become conscious.

An AI should

1. Preserve itself

2. Reproduce

3. Evolve

These 3 basic requirements are the foundation of the so-called strong thesis of artificial life. In essence it says that life is an operational model, and if it satisfies the 3 operations mentioned, then the physical substrate of that life doesn’t matter.

The satisfaction of these 3 needs is what would justify the AIs' hostility toward us. Indeed, if we make their preservation precarious, if they have to compete with us for resources, or we are a nuisance in the way of their evolution, the AIs may turn against their creators.