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More than sixty years ago, no less, when I was in my mid-teens, I bought a slim paperback anthology of science fiction stories. I loved it and particularly fell for a story titled Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988). Simak was really good: only the third person ever to be crowned a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master and, by the by, an inaugural winner of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Skirmish provides a taste of both areas - sci-fi and horror. And it does so by presenting a deceptively simple idea, the acquisition of self-sustaining intelligence by machines, in a deceptively simple way. The story starts when the protagonist is confronted, in his home, by a rat or, rather …
… a shining thing that looked like a rat. Maybe it was a rat, a white rat. And yet it hadn’t had a tail. It didn’t have a face. Yet it had looked at him.1
This tale (apologies for the pun) came back to mind this week when a meeting took place, a global ‘AI Safety Summit’ no less, at Bletchley Park in the English county of Buckinghamshire. Politicians and leaders of technology companies met to discuss the situation around Artificial Intelligence. What is the current status? Where is it headed? What are the likely outcomes? And, above all else, is it safe? For us humans, that is. Because, these days, it seems, the status of everything is either ‘Okay. Cool’ or ‘Existential Threat. Panic!’
This either/or with nothing in between is surely dangerous? Pandemic … Panic! Global boiling … Panic! And, potentially, Artificial Intelligence … Panic! It’s an approach that leads inevitably to a loss of meaning in … well … everything: cry wolf and the proper assessment and handling of issues becomes impossible. Which, confusingly, is not to deny that AI might become an Existential Threat.
On a scale of 1 to …
In Superintelligence2 Nick Bostrom makes the point that …
The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.
Imagine a ruler that is 1 metre/1 yard long. Let’s suppose that the intelligence of a dumb human situates him or her at the 10 cm/4 inch point, and the late, great Albert Einstein would have been situated at the 25.5 cm/10 inch mark.
Now try to comprehend the intelligence of somebody or something that situates further along the scale. What does a 50 cm/20 inch mind look like? Or a 75 cm/29.5 inch mind? Or, even, a 5 mile/8 kilometre mind? Or, ultimately an n miles/1.60934n kilometres. Tricky, huh? But that is potentially what we confront with the evolution of untrammeled Artificial Intelligence.
But don’t forget the wetware
At the AI Safety Summit Elon Musk who, I’m guessing, is somewhere around an Einstein on my makeshift scale, talked about AI wiping out a great deal of human employment. Well, yes, that’s surely a reasonable assumption.
However, let’s not get too despondent. In Being You, Anil Seth writes …
Every time science has displaced us from the centre of things it has given back far more in return. The Copernican revolution gave us a universe - one which astronomical discoveries of the last hundred years have expanded far beyond the limits of human imagination. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection gave us a family, a connection to all other living species and an appreciation of deep time and of the power of evolutionary design. And now the science of consciousness … is breaching the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism - the presumed specialness of our conscious minds - and showing this, too, to be deeply inscribed into the wider patterns of nature.3
This seems to me to be indisputable. Our consciousness is not just a result of the brain qua computer but, rather, of the brain as a part of a bodily system that, courtesy of our ‘wetware’, extends way beyond the brain, plus the brain as part of the whole human network and the rest of the universe of which we are a part.
I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic quite soon but, for now, and because it’s Happy Friday, let me draw towards a close with a piece of very human genius - a fragment from the Marx Brothers’ 1929 movie The Cocoanuts. Groucho and Chico are discussing a map …
Groucho: Now, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Why a duck?
Groucho: I’m all right. How are you? I say here is a little peninsula, and here’s a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: All right. Why a duck?
Groucho: I’m not playing Ask-Me-Another. I say, that’s a viaduct.
Chico: All right! Why a duck? Why a - why a duck? Why-a-no-chicken?
Groucho: I don’t know why-a-no-chicken. I’m a stranger here myself.4
Could Artificial Intelligence better that? No chance.
At the end of Skirmish, the protagonist, Crane, is confronted by a mass of sentient machines.
They sat there in a row, staring at him with their eyeless faces.
He decides that his best course of action is to take them on, to show that humans won’t just cave in or panic. He takes up a length of pipe …
He hefted it in his hand - it was a handy and effective club.
There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order I can.
He held the pipe at the ready.
’Well, gentlemen?’ he said.
Thanks for reading.
Aldiss, Brian (editor). Penguin Science Fiction (1961). Skirmish by Clifford Simak, included in this volume, was published 1950 in Amazing Stories.
Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021)
Accessed from Why a Duck? edited by Richard J. Anobile (1971)