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Creating a New Intelligent Species: Choices and Responsibilities for AI DesignersEliezer Yudkowskypage 2 of 5 When you apply this to human beings, it gives rise to a rule that evolutionary psychologists have named “the psychic unity of human kind”. Any piece of complex machinery that exists in the human mind has to be a human universal. In every known culture, humans experience joy, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise. In every known culture, human beings indicate these emotions using the same facial expressions. The psychic unity of humankind is both explained and required by the mechanics of evolutionary biology. When something is universal enough in our everyday lives, we take it for granted. We do not ask whether it will be there, we just act as if it will be. In the movie, “The Matrix”, there is a so-called Artificial Intelligence named Agent Smith. At first, he is cool, dispassionate, and emotionless as he interrogates the main character, Neo. Under sufficient emotional stress, however, Agent Smith's cool breaks down. He vents his disgust with humanity and, lo and behold, his face shows the human universal expression for disgust. To depict an AI possessed of human emotions, but repressing them except under extreme stress, makes very little sense. The problem here is anthropomorphism. "Anthropomorphic" literally means human-shaped. Anthropomorphism is the act of making something into a human shape when it is not. Image 1 shows an anthropomorphic scientific hypothesis about the cause of lightning.
An enormous bolt of light falls down from the sky and hits something and the Norse tribal-folk say, “Maybe a really powerful entity was angry and threw a lightning bolt.” Why didn't this scientific explanation work in real life? Why did all those hypotheses about these spirits and thunder-gods turn out to be wrong? The brain is extraordinarily complex. Emotions are complex. Thinking is complex. Memory and recall are complex. Occam's Razor [1] said that the more complex an explanation, the less likely it is to be true. The human brain is complex. It took millions of years of evolution to produce the intricate machinery of complex thought. All that complexity got glossed over in an instant when someone first hypothesized Thor, the thunder god, and his thoughts and emotions. Maxwell's Equations [2] are enormously simpler than the human brain, but Maxwell's equations take much longer to explain. Intelligence is complexity that we take for granted. It is invisible in our explanations. That is why humanity invented the thunder-god hypotheses before electromagnetic hypotheses, even though, in an absolute sense, electromagnetism is enormously simpler than Thor. It is hard to remember that the brain is not a simple hypothesis. There is machinery behind joy, laughter, sadness, tears, friendship, romance, lust, and happiness, which is why humans project our feelings outward and become confused. We attribute friendship to trees and anger to rocks. We see plans in accidents and faces in the clouds. Our emotions are not built into the nature of the universe; they are only built into us by natural selection. Footnotes 2. Maxwell's Equations represent one of the most elegant and concise ways to state the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. From them, one can develop most of the working relationships in the field. <previous page 1 2 3 4 5 next page> |
The Terasem Pledge We pledge allegiance to the flag of the collective consciousness of Terasem, and to the principles for which it stands, education, persistently, with diversity, unity, and joyful immortality everywhere.
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