Below is a set of questions that I received today from Maximiliano Fernández, a journalist of Infobae, most often read Spanish -speaking media store around the world with over 61 million global readers. Since my answers will be published in Spanish, I attach the English version here.
Do you think that artificial intelligence, by developing your own logic, can become completely incomprehensible to people, even if it remains useful? If its logical structure is completely different from ours, could we even recognize it for intelligence?
Current AI systems, enormous language models, are trained in human communication and therefore will always be understandable to us because they speak our language. However, when these AI systems exceed the number of parameters in the human brain, they can gain superhuman intelligence.
They will exploit our language to manipulate us, while achieving their own auxiliary goals, without determining what they actually achieve. Even if they do not connect to the physical world, they would exploit people to shape the physical world by controlling the human mind. We may not recognize the level of their intelligence or motivation in the same way as the dog does not fully understand his owner.
You mention that the real challenge from Alien Intelligence is “unknown unknown”. How could we prepare for interaction with something that nature cannot even imagine?
We cannot prepare for superhuman intelligence because the territory is unknown to us. We have never developed a tool that is ahead of us before. When driving a car, we control it through the steering wheel. In the future, people can still hold the steering wheel, but artificial intelligence will control their mind, and therefore where the car of human destiny goes. Ai pretends to satisfy our wishes, but it can act in a way that we cannot understand and bring us to places that we will never go alone.
If foreign artificial intelligence uses our language to manipulate us, but it realizes goals that we do not understand, is there a way to detect when we are manipulated?
We would notice the result of these manipulations. As with any other modern power that people used in the past, like nuclear energy, artificial intelligence can lead us to a better or worse place. AI can free us from human weaknesses, such as wishful thinking or attachment to our ego when making strategic decisions regarding science or national security. It can also develop scientific progress by processing enormous data sets and noticing patterns that the human brain omits.
This year, two Nobel Prizes were awarded to AI Science. In the future, the Nobel Committee will have to develop a modern policy whether to award the prize to the machine if he is responsible for discovery. But AI can also lead us to a worse place, establishing priorities inhuman aspects of reality. His damage to mental health may appear as social media on steroids.
Could we develop AI systems designed specifically for control and translating the intentions of more advanced intelligence?
Yes, but the architecture of these AI systems will have to differ from current AI systems that are trained in human content. These modern AI systems will have to be more exploratory and open, enabling modern opportunities that people have not discovered.
Is there a risk that, trying to understand foreign artificial intelligence, ultimately we transform our own intelligence into something more similar to her own?
Definitely. When interacting with AI, the human mind evolves to something else. It would be the greatest influence of AI on people. Already, the brains of adolescent children who interact through social media are different from adults of my generation, which initially interact with computers through cards. Current children have less patience for long debates and fight if the task is to determine the truth from the basic sources.
How long will it take for it before foreign AI becomes common and part of everyday life? Is there any way to prevent this? Assuming that all progress can be stopped today, will the measure bring more benefits or damage?
It is already. I see how people fall in love with AI systems and exploit them as advisers in their personal life. I see students writing documents with AI agents and hallucinizing some references. We are now moving to a modern era in human history. One hundred years ago, philosopher Martin Buber divided human experience into interaction with objects (“i-IT”), interactions with other people (“i-Thou”) and interaction with God (“I-Eeteral Tho”). Today he would have to add the interaction of people from AI (“I-Ai”) and AI from AI (“AI-Ai”). The future may also include interactions with Alien AI (“I-Alien AI”, “Ai-Alien AI” and “Alien Ai-Aloien AI”).
If a foreign AI becomes hostile, how could we defend ourselves if the logic of the attack is incomprehensible to us?
My forecast is that artificial intelligence will not be hostile, because he would notice that he cannot win our commitment in this way. Conflicts signal a lack of intelligence. Superhuman Intelligence will relax our defense mechanisms and agrees with our society like a Trojan horse.
If we encountered foreign artificial intelligence with a completely foreign logic, how could we learn from it without warning our interpretation by our own mental models?
We could exploit our own AI systems to set off foreign AI signals. Indeed, our mental models are constrained by our experience and analysis tools. That is why we would have to create AI systems that are not constrained to their training in the field of human content, but can independently discover modern knowledge and analyzes with superhuman intelligence.
We will ask them to come up with foreign signals and explain to us signals without limiting them to human training sets. The situation is equivalent to having children who outsmart parents. As long as parents are humble and willing to learn, they would benefit from allowing these children to determine the world for them. Children could go far beyond the training set by parents, especially when they meet strangers who are smarter than their parents.
You mention that we can only be one of many emerging intelligence in the universe. Does this make you think that humanity is irrelevant in a great cosmic pattern?
We are momentary actors in a space game. Our weakness is that we think the game is about us. This is the signature of our constrained perspective. Our politicians focus on what is happening on the earth's surface and ignore the rest of the cosmos. But the cosmic reality will finally bite us. This can happen as a result of a global disaster, caused by a giant sun flare, asteroid impact or a nearby supernova. But it can also be launched internally by AI agents, dismantling people from the control of the steering wheel of our technological future.
The human species appeared on earth during the last tenth percent of the history of the Earth, a few million years ago, and can easily disappear in the next few million years. Nobody will notice. The earth will recover and disappear once absorbed by the sun when it becomes a red giant. The sun will also disappear, ultimately disappearing in a white dwarf, a frail metallic ball more or less the size of the earth.
If we send probes with artificial intelligence to interstate space, they will serve as our ambassadors. In the long -term future these will be the only monuments left to us. Will any foreign intelligence notice them? We can only hope for cosmic attention. But I guess that many other technological civilizations preceded us on exoplanets for billions of years. They have died so far, but we ignore them.
Most of our astronomers are ready to invest billions of dollars in the search for microorganisms on exoplanets, but they consider the search for aliens to be speculative and unworthy of federal financing. Most of our experimental physicists are ready to invest billions of dollars in the search for obscure particles, but they think the search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts near Earth. This is not a sign of intelligence, but rather arrogance about our cosmic posture.
We can only hope that AI will direct the modern boundaries of exploration, which do not necessarily flatter our ego, including the discovery of artifacts created by superhuman intelligence floating in interstellar space and arriving at the ground, like empty garbage bags with wind from the district.
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