blade.ograss666@gmail.com wrote:
> Why not meet the AIs half way by augmenting ourselves with electrronic
> devices? Or maybe our AI children may see us as similar beings rather
> than aliens. Or better yet, perhaps the AIs will see us as useful
> tools that can help them achieve their goals (you don't have murderous
> intent for your antibodies...do you?), then why would the AIs have
> murderous intent tword us? We may be more beneficial than we can yet
> imagine.

It all comes down to conflicts over resources.  That's what makes human
kill each other and that's what would make AI's want to kill humans.

The reason humans can in general manage to live together at all is because
we have common needs and as such, when one of us does something to help
themselves, they also tend to be able to benefit others at the same time.
One guy learns to grow corn, and that knowledge is useful to everyone
because having more corn to eat is beneficial to everyone - we all need the
same thing.  When the second guy finds a way to build a better house,
everyone benefits.  All this common need makes it natural for people to
share, and work together, because there is so much we share in common that
we can agree on to work together on.  All our most basic goals tend to be
better met by having us work together and help one another.

If we build AIs that were motivated for survival like we are, they won't
share much of anything in common with us.  The conflicts between humans
would be nothing compared to the conflicts between the AIs and the humans.
We rely on the chain of life on the Earth for our survival.  We need plants
making O2 for us to breath.  We need the entire web of life on the planet
creating food for us to eat.  We need lots of clean water to drink.

If the AIs are anything like our current robots, then they don't need cows,
and chickens, and grass, and O2 in the air.  Unlike humans, they can be
built so radiation doesn't effect them.  They, as a society, would want to
build lots of nuclear plants to produce lots of energy, and burn up all the
fossil fuels to do it.  They would want to mine all the natural resources
out of the ground to build more robots and wouldn't care if life died in
the process because unlike humans, they don't need any of that living stuff
around - it only gets in their way.  Tree's, plants, top soil - they don't
care about any of that, it's all just "weeds" to them.

These sorts of difference would create a huge divide of opinion over what
was important between human society and the AI society.  It would create a
split which would lead to conflict which would in the end lead to all out
war.  And it would all be because we don't have shared common needs.  What
the AIs need has very little in common to what humans need.  It's the
shared common needs that force humans to play nice together and the lack of
those shared common needs would cause the AIs and humans to go to war.

I suspect however, it would never come to that because we will understand
how dangerous these survival based AIs would be to human life (a lot more
dangerous than atomic bombs are to human life) and we would never let them
get anywhere near powerful enough to win this war with us.  Long before
they all gang together to wipe out the humans, individual AIs will show us
their true danger by getting pissed off and killing some humans.  The more
we see that happen, the more we will fear them and wipe them out and not
build those sorts of AIs.

Either we figure out how to build safe AIs that don't have such a strong
desire to survive and who only have a strong desire to make humans happy,
or we don't build them at all.

In the long run, humans might evolve into a type of engineered machine
(become an AI) by some long process of augmentation which transforms what
we think of as humans from biological machines to some other form.  But
then we haven't lost a war with the AIs, we have just transformed ourselves
(as a race) into a race of AIs.  You could say the AIs "won" in that case,
but not because we lost a war against them, but because as a society, we
decided to become AIs.

-- 
Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com                                        http://NewsReader.Com/