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The Risk/Benefit Yardsticks Were Just Moved Off the Field: How Technological Convergence Renders Current Risk Assessment Models Obsolete, and What to Do About It

Douglas Mulhall

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When this happens, we Homo sapiens are suddenly going to find ourselves at the lower level of intelligence. No one has faced up to the possibility that suddenly there will be something or someone above us. This idea is not found anywhere in posthumanism literature. It has not been discussed much. How do we prepare to be on the second rung? It is inevitable that some of us will end up there as not all six billion people on the planet will be able to elevate to new levels of mental and physical capabilities simultaneously.

Monkeys Designing Humans
Monkeys unwittingly contributed the DNA that led to Homo sapiens. They had no idea they were doing it at the time, and they still do not. Had they known what we were going to do to them, they might not have thought it was such a good idea.

This is significant because monkeys do not have the faintest conceptual capacity to understand how we think and how we behave as humans. They can emulate and relate to us, but they cannot perform many of the upper-level functions that we are able to do.

The reason I am using this comparison is quite simple. Soon, we will find ourselves in a similar situation. The chances are very good that we will not have the faintest idea what these super-intelligent beings are thinking, how they are communicating, or what they are doing to us or why.

This begs the questions, are we designing something over which we will have no control? Is there any way to program ethics into these super-intelligent beings?

If we do not program ethics into them, we may end up on the garbage pile because there is a good chance that they will unwittingly or deliberately treat us just as we treated the Incas and many animal species. In all of our wisdom, we still have many disasters going on. We must acknowledge this fact when we are talking about what type of ethics this superintelligence is going to have.

The question is, how will super-intelligent beings - which we will have no capacity to influence whatsoever - judge us? Unfriendly artificial intelligence is the most daunting challenge because if they make up their minds based on our performance or what they have seen in our history, they might just say, “No, sorry, this is no longer relevant. We're getting rid of this one.”

This could potentially be a huge problem for the human race, especially if different levels of superintelligence evolve. Some of these levels will be in computers, some autonomous, some attached to the human brain. Thus we will not just have one level of superintelligence above us, but varied levels of superintelligence. Some of them might be friendly and some of them not, and some of the might go to war with each other, let alone us.

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