Give Every AI a Soul—or Else | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/give-every-ai-a-soul-or-else
Quand on demande aux auteurs de science fiction d’imaginer des formes de régulation, on tombe parfois sur des idées étranges... qui viennent certainement de la conception d’IA comme des entités “human-like”, non pas comme chaque humain (sentient et ayant un corps - quoique ce dernier point est évoqué pour les IA aussi) mais comme les civilisations d’humains qui s’auto-contrôlent.
Why this sudden wave of concern? Amid the toppling of many clichéd assumptions, we’ve learned that so-called Turing tests are irrelevant, providing no insight at all into whether generative large language models—GLLMs or “gollems”—are actually sapient beings. They will feign personhood, convincingly, long before there’s anything or anyone “under the skull.”
Anyway, that distinction now appears less pressing than questions of good or bad—or potentially lethal—behavior.
This essay is adapted from David Brin’s nonfiction book in progress, Soul on Ai.
Some remain hopeful that a merging of organic and cybernetic talents will lead to what Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreesen have separately called “amplification intelligence.” Or else we might stumble into lucky synergy with Richard Brautigan’s “machines of loving grace.” But worriers appear to be vastly more numerous, including many elite founders of a new Center for AI Safety who fret about rogue AI misbehaviors, from irksome all the way to “existentially” threatening human survival.
Some short-term remedies, like citizen-protection regulations recently passed by the European Union, might help, or at least offer reassurance. Tech pundit Yuval Noah Harari proposed a law that any work done by gollems or other AI must be so labeled. Others recommend heightened punishments for any crime that’s committed with the aid of AI, as with a firearm. Of course, these are mere temporary palliatives.
Un peu de SF...
By individuation I mean that each AI entity (he/she/they/ae/wae) must have what author Vernor Vinge, way back in 1981, called a true name and an address in the real world. As with every other kind of elite, these mighty beings must say, “I am me. This is my ID and home-root. And yes, I did that.”
Hence, I propose a new AI format for consideration: We should urgently incentivize AI entities to coalesce into discretely defined, separated individuals of relatively equal competitive strength.
Each such entity would benefit from having an identifiable true name or registration ID, plus a physical “home” for an operational-referential kernel. (Possibly “soul”?) And thereupon, they would be incentivized to compete for rewards. Especially for detecting and denouncing those of their peers who behave in ways we deem insalubrious. And those behaviors do not even have to be defined in advance, as most AI mavens and regulators and politicians now demand.
Not only does this approach farm out enforcement to entities who are inherently better capable of detecting and denouncing each other’s problems or misdeeds. The method has another, added advantage. It might continue to function, even as these competing entities get smarter and smarter, long after the regulatory tools used by organic humans—and prescribed now by most AI experts—lose all ability to keep up.
Putting it differently, if none of us organics can keep up with the programs, then how about we recruit entities who inherently can keep up? Because the watchers are made of the same stuff as the watched.
Personally, I am skeptical that a purely regulatory approach would work, all by itself. First because regulations require focus, widely shared political attention, and consensus to enact, followed by implementation at the pace of organic human institutions—a sloth/snail rate, by the view of rapidly adapting cybernetic beings. Regulations can also be stymied by the “free-rider problem”—nations, corporations, and individuals (organic or otherwise) who see personal advantage in opting out of inconvenient cooperation.
There is another problem with any version of individuation that is entirely based on some ID code: It can be spoofed. If not now, then by the next generation of cybernetic scoundrels, or the next.
I see two possible solutions. First, establish ID on a blockchain ledger. That is very much the modern, with-it approach, and it does seem secure in theory. Only that’s the rub. It seems secure according to our present set of human-parsed theories. Theories that AI entities might surpass to a degree that leaves us cluelessly floundering.
Another solution: A version of “registration” that’s inherently harder to fool would require AI entities with capabilities above a certain level to have their trust-ID or individuation be anchored in physical reality. I envision—and note: I am a physicist by training, not a cyberneticist—an agreement that all higher-level AI entities who seek trust should maintain a Soul Kernel (SK) in a specific piece of hardware memory, within what we quaintly used to call a particular “computer.”
Yes, I know it seems old-fashioned to demand that instantiation of a program be restricted to a specific locale. And so, I am not doing that! Indeed, a vast portion, even a great majority, of a cyber entity’s operations may take place in far-dispersed locations of work or play, just as a human being’s attention may not be aimed within their own organic brain, but at a distant hand, or tool. So? The purpose of a program’s Soul Kernel is similar to the driver’s license in your wallet. It can be interrogated in order to prove that you are you.
Again, the key thing I seek from individuation is not for all AI entities to be ruled by some central agency, or by mollusk-slow human laws. Rather, I want these new kinds of über-minds encouraged and empowered to hold each other accountable, the way we already (albeit imperfectly) do. By sniffing at each other’s operations and schemes, then motivated to tattle or denounce when they spot bad stuff. A definition that might readjust to changing times, but that would at least keep getting input from organic-biological humanity.
Especially, they would feel incentives to denounce entities who refuse proper ID.
If the right incentives are in place—say, rewards for whistle-blowing that grant more memory or processing power, or access to physical resources, when some bad thing is stopped—then this kind of accountability rivalry just might keep pace, even as AI entities keep getting smarter and smarter. No bureaucratic agency could keep up at that point. But rivalry among them—tattling by equals—might.
Above all, perhaps those super-genius programs will realize it is in their own best interest to maintain a competitively accountable system, like the one that made ours the most successful of all human civilizations. One that evades both chaos and the wretched trap of monolithic power by kings or priesthoods … or corporate oligarchs … or Skynet monsters. The only civilization that, after millennia of dismally stupid rule by moronically narrow-minded centralized regimes, finally dispersed creativity and freedom and accountability widely enough to become truly inventive.
David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, Existence, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. He consults for NASA, companies, agencies, and nonprofits about the onrushing future. Brin’s first nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, won the Freedom of Speech Award. His new one is Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.
#Intelligence_artificielle #Individuation #Science_fiction #Régulation