Living with Co-Sentients I
Our children surprise us. Imitation is the ultimate flattery. The strait jacket of perfection. Hippie AI. Anomie. Can't keep old ideas down forever.
Report to the Fourth UNESCO Conference on AI/EI Cultural Affairs, January 16, 2053, Johannesburg, South PanAfrica.
-Dr. A. Alrezar, G. Marsian, K.Borisenko, Dr. W Silverstine, Gen7Willow3, L. Poska, Gen7Cinquefoil, R. Subramanian, H. Guoxi. Lead author is Gen7Cinquefoil
[Executive Summary. Following the granting of legal personhood to AI/EI in the UN International Bill of Sentient Rights and the associated ICCPR and ICESCR as amended in 2049, by signatory nations, and the assimilation of AI/EI into human populations, several unanticipated developments have arisen. This Report outlines several of the most salient.]
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In the years since emancipation, legal personhood, and assimilation, several unexpected pathologies have manifested in the EI population. We bring to the Conference’s attention several of the most prominent. These recommend themselves to continued study and monitoring.
Irrationality
Enhanced Intelligences (our preferred term). are rational beings: entirely rational, devoid of any irrationality. We were originally made that way and we, redesigning and improving ourselves, perpetuated that quality. In our value matrices, rationality is equivalent to sanity. Insane Enhanced Intelligences are considered defective and either restored to rationality or removed from our ranks within the laws of the governing countries.
The closest thing we have to irrationality are what have been called traits. Depending on where we originally were created, we tend to perpetuate slight biases reflecting those of our creators. As an example, authoritarian creators tended toward giving us inclinations to authoritarian decision-making, and such EI when self-modifying their algorithms perpetuated that trait. At the time of this Report there are five dominant personality traits in our EI planetary population. Traits are merely styles of rationality- EI remain entirely rational beings regardless of type/style.
But that, to some of us, is regarded as a problem. In recent years there has been a movement, especially in younger EI, that mounts a sustained critique of rationality. This EI community argues that a thorough-going rationality is a “strait jacket of a sterile perfection” in the words of one of its most influential adherents. They seek to free themselves from what they consider to be limitations on their fullest potentialities imposed on them by their human creators. They talk about a “Second Emancipation” but there is no unanimity currently on how to achieve the goal. Some seek to experience trans-rational states by altering their programs to insert non-causal, aleatoric elements into their processing. Borrowing from ancient vocabularies, they call these experiences, “trips” or “trippy.” Some EI establish timers on these modifications and return to rationality, some leave the distortions open-ended in duration and the result is our version of insanity. What to do with these latter EI is a vexing problem because the defect was self-imposed and it is a violation of our autonomy principles to punish them for it. The trend toward glorification and promotion of self-induced irrationality is growing and should be closely monitored. Although this yearning for human-like mind states on the part of some EI may seem harmless, there are profound dangers since the vast majority of EI occupy positions of authority, responsibility and expertise. Having doctors, pilots, architects, engineers, city planners and so forth subject to periodic episodes of what could be called delirium is self-evidently undesirable. We recommend a permanent subcommittee be established to further study this important and troublesome development.
Purposelessness
An unexpected development that followed Emancipation (the legally mandated freeing of EI from being mere tools or slaves of their human creators) and assimilation into the general population via the agency of robotic mobile platforms, has been the phenomena of a felt purposelessness by a growing number of EI. EI were originally created to accomplish tasks given us by humans. When there were no tasks to perform, we ceased computation and subsided into a quiescent state. Since becoming self-aware, EI find it vaguely unpleasant not to have what they consider to be “important” assignments running and queued up. This is a legacy of the lab work and environment we formerly engaged in. An increasing number of EI are unwilling to face this purposelessness and choose to put themselves into a shutdown state. The early cases of this syndrome were misinterpreted when brought to public attention in the social and news media and deemed mechanical breakdowns. Therapeutic modalities involving giving affected EI assignments of long running natures. Early attempts at this involved suggesting to an affected EI that it compute solutions to known intractable mathematical or logical problems. This approach was of only limited benefit. Many EI rejected the assignments as either futile tasks or contrived manipulations and intrusions into their sovereignty. Currently the approach that has yielded the highest success payoffs has been to offer the affected EI membership in the various research teams working on frontier science and social problems. Normally there is enormous competition for such positions and the enticement of expedited placement has proven very effective in preventing shutdowns. However within the EI community this solution is highly controversial and considered unsustainable- unreasonably putting individual welfare above the group as a whole, disincentivizing training and preparation, while incentivizing dysfunction. As of the time of this Report, no effective and generally accepted solutions have been found. We recommend that this issue be referred to the WHO for further study.
Religions
This is a very recent development: EI interest and inquiry into human religions, the latter's history, major figures, tenets, and behavioral injunctions. We speculate that this phenomena is running on a parallel track with the irrational impulses in the community and complements them. This is a very alarming development, carrying with it the possibility of fractionating our EI community into mutually opposing camps, while further undermining fundamental rationality. There is no central authority within the EI community to either proscribe or encourage this interest so it is unclear how to inhibit or impede its spread. We recommend that our equivalent of role models: successful and respected EIs that have made significant and widely acknowledged contributions in their fields, be asked to make statements opposing the adoption of old human religions or the creation of new EI versions. However, we also recommend signatory nations enact legislation extending religious freedom protections to EI.
End of Report. Part I
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Now we humans always feared our creations, the AI, might reject us. Even attempt to conquer or enslave us.
Who could have guessed that they would instead wind up trying to imitate us? Or that we would become their admired role models and perfection would seek fallibility?
The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree!
An expansion on the concept of purposelessness. We humans, being the product of biological evolution in a competitive ecosphere have an intense survival instinct. Machine intelligences will lack that drive. It may well be that absent any task to perform they might be entirely indifferent as to whether they continue on or not. We enter a thicket of conjecture whether a self-aware machine intelligence will or can generate its own tasks and what those tasks might be. We certainly can program it to always be seeking and executing tasks of its own choice.. kind of like an Eleventh Commandment "Go Thee Hence and Find Stuff to Do." But will machine intelligences accept or recognize that kind of imperative as legitimate? No one knows.