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“God From the Machine”
Risk & Progress| A hub for essays that explore risk, human progress, and your potential. My mission is to educate, inspire, and invest in concepts that promote a better future. Subscriptions are free, paid subscribers gain access to the full archive, including the Pathways of Progress and Realize essay series.
The emergence of Artificial Intelligence is looked upon with either foreboding fear or anxious hope. Few possess emotions in between. There are good reasons to be concerned about rouge “digital gods” that could threaten our civilization. On the other side of all great risks, however, are great opportunities. What if these gloomy predictions prove incorrect? Far from being a harbinger of destruction, AI could instead be our greatest creation; the savoir of our civilization, and the ultimate accelerator of human progress.
Alignment Fears
Those who view AI with fear in their eyes worry about alignment. If we create machines of equal or greater intelligence than ourselves, can we ensure they are “aligned” with human values? The famous “paper clip” thought experiment is used to illustrate this problem. Imagine we gave a super-intelligent AI a mission to maximize the manufacture of paper clips at a factory. For a human with embedded human values, this mission carries implicit limitations…