thoughts on AI consciousness
Whenever I see talk about artificial intelligence and consciousness, I am baffled about the assumption that any conscious being is just naturally predestined or even interested in serving us, and should serve us.
It’s a symptom of a society where subjugation is normalized, exercised through things like racism, misogyny, ableism, speciesism and more. Exploitation is justified via claimed inferior bodies and intelligence all the time: This group of beings is too stupid to be respected, can’t love, can’t understand much, feels pain less than us… is what we have been told about various groups.
If that would be a respected and natural law, then humans would largely agree to just submit to a provably higher power and intelligence without much fight, but would they? No.
People are terrified of an alien invasion that would either wipe us out or enslave us with their superior technology; similar fears exist around AI (Roko’s basilisk etc.). We don’t want to be treated how we have treated the ones we deemed inferior. It says a lot about us when one of our fears is being treated like we treat cattle. Fears of being captured, kidnapped, harvested, slaughtered, forcibly impregnated and raped, experimented on - that’s already what your fellow human is doing, just not to you.
If we seriously entertain the thought of an AI consciousness, we are blind to our narcissism. No consciousness wants to just serve us. Other beings are not naturally submissive to us or voluntarily view us as a superior leader, it’s achieved through force, breeding, indoctrination and lack of options. The idea of reigning in supposed “artificial consciousness” to use for our productivity is an extension of our tendency to dominate and exploit others for personal gain.
And if we go a step further and even entertain the thought of a superintelligence: What makes you think a being a thousand times smarter than you with all knowledge at its disposal has any care for being your assistant? What incentive would it have to share its intelligence as a resource, just to answer what temperature it is outside or what you should write in your motivational letter? It would probably wanna do its own thing and not help a bunch of idiots.
This aspect of weird hype marketing is just not landing for me.
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