Recently I attended an interdisciplinary event on artificial intelligence or AI. This is a very fashionable topic. After 2016 (the so-called declared global year of AI), there is still interest also because we can now see how some AI solutions have entered the market. Robots that can fry burgers and of course self-driving cars are becoming normal examples of life.
Still, my sense is that both love for and fear of AI is rooted in either we becoming slaves of new forms of intelligence or subverting them to what we think we need help with.
Being enslaved by AI seems to many the end of the human species. AI will decide for us and that will include deciding if we are still worth preserving in the human planet or beyond.
Enslaving AI would mean that AI will do the less interesting tasks of life whilst human beings move onto the more sophisticated ones.
As I currently research on creativity, the role of technology and AI is not yet fully decided. Computers could create beautiful things, they could compose music or poems by sieving through lots of old music of poems. They could even create new language. But if we conceive of creativity as a social phenomena where audiences have to accept and adopt creations, then possibly technology and AI could have a different role.
And then there is the ethical question of doing good with what you create. AI could help us build or operate new armaments (more autonomous drones for example). AI could help us distance themselves from those that we could harm. So that AI could take the blame for doing harm. Or for doing good.
Will we as human beings delegate ethical responsibilities to AI? And by doing so will we then enslave AI and ourselves? Or will AI and us be able to work out other ways of advancing our joint future together?
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