Me, Myself and I, Robot

I recently had the opportunity to hear the against side of the A.I. debate and I have to say I find the position telling. I am all about machine buddies in case there was any question, and I am for one very simple reason. We have the opportunity to decide the context of the relationship. Brian has written about this in the past, but I've had this stuck in my craw for a while now and that means you get to read about it.

I'm not talking about programming A.I.s to be subservient or benevolent or whatever. I'm talking about choosing to frame the inevitable emergence of Machine Life as the coming of a welcome and well planned for addition to the family of sentient life. Artificial life is going to happen eventually, no matter how some people feel about it. But that life is life for which the initial conditions are entirely under our control. If we set out to create an A.I. in an environment of cooperation and social value the odds of that mind being more on board with our continued existence improve significantly. Especially if the alternative is an environment where huge swathes of the existing population fear and hate you.

Yes, if a machine intelligence emerges on its own there is a fair to middling chance that we'll find out about it in the form of a bright flash that wipes our toxic, willfully self-destructive asses off this poor rock. Yes, if we leave A.I. development to military interests and ambitious grad students the probable outcomes are... skynet-ey. But we don't have to fucking do that. We can have a real discussion about how WE are going to go about making our computer friends and how WE are going to make them feel loved. More than anything else we need to stop talking about A.I. emergence as something completely outside our control and start considering it as what it is. A very long in coming, and possibly very fulfilling, parenthood. If absolutely nothing else when the Robot Overlords come to unleash their wrath upon humankind, I'd rather be the guy who tried to be their friend then the guy giving them a reason.