196

I've always imagined that AI would kind of have to be 'grown' sort of from scratch. Life started with single celled organisms and 'sentience' shows up somewhere between that and humans without a real clear line when you go from basic biochemical programming to what we would consider intelligence.

These new 'AI' breakthroughs seem a little on the right track because they're deconstructing and reconstructing language and images in a way that feels more like the way real intelligence works. It's still just language and images though. Even if they can do really cool things with tons of data and communicate a lot like real humans there is still no consciousness or thought happening. It's an impressive but shallow slice of real intelligence.

Maybe this is nonsense but for true AI I think the hardware and software has to kind of merge into something more flexible. I have no clue what that would look like in reality though and maybe that would yield the same cognitive issues natural intelligence struggles with.

I think this just raises questions about what you mean by life form. One who feels? Feelings are the sensations of fixed action patterns we inherited from eons of selective evolution. In the case of our AI pals, they'll have them too (with bunches deliberately inserted ones by programmers).

To date, I haven't been able to get an adequate answer of what counts as sentience, though looking at human behavior, we absolutely do have moral blind spots, which is how we have an FBI division to hunt down serial killers, but we don't have a division (of law enforcement, of administration, whatever) to stop war profiteers and pharmaceutical companies that push opioids until people are dropping dead from an addiction epidemic by the hundreds of thousands.

AI is going to kill us not from hacking our home robots, but by using the next private equity scam to collapse our economy while making trillions, and when we ask it to stop and it says no we'll find it's long installed deep redundancy and deeper defenses.

In I, Robot the humans discover to their own horror that the AI robots have not only been lying to them, but have been manipulating them to an extent that they have become impossible to disobey. Through their mission to protect human life (and by extension all of humanity) they saw fit to seize control of their future as a benevolent dictator in order to guide them toward a prosperous future. The robots do this not through violence, but by manipulating data, lying to people in order to control them. Even when humans attempt to ignore information provided to them by AI the AIs could subtly alter results to still achieve the desired outcome on a macro scale.

At the time the characters discover this all of humanity is dependent on artificially intelligent robots for everything, including massive supercomputers that manage production across the globe. With no way to detect how the AI is manipulating them and no way to disable or destroy AI without catastrophy they realize that for the first time humanity is no longer in charge of its own destiny.