How to design an exterminator AI

From OpenArt.ai

Posted here as a service to those misanthropists who wish to exterminate the human race, but lack the necessary strategic vision.

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First, don't go the pure AI route. You'll find that it's orders of magnitude easier to engineer a bunch of gain-of-function viral pathogens and let them loose. In fact, lose the idea of the dangers of high-intelligence entirely. Plenty of highly-intelligent people died in prison cells or death camps. An enhanced capacity for abstract thought only takes you so far.

To make humanity, or any species, extinct, you have to change the parameters of that species’ environment to ensure subsequent reproduction tends to zero.

A simple approach is to drop a sufficiently large rock on the planet. But sometimes the introduction of a new, invasive species is enough to do the trick - rats introduced onto a hitherto-pristine island is a well-known case study. 

Could you use advanced AI to enable a lethal threat to humanity? Create a new species to occupy our human niche, preventing humans in their totality from continuing?

Some of you will say that the TFR data shows that capitalism and contraception are already taking us way down that path. But not all humans will be affected: those who disdain such will inherit the Earth - a future paradise for the Amish (h/t Robin Hanson).

Putting both viruses and progressive antinatalism to one side, what people really want to hear about, it seems, are killer robots.

They're hard. 

It's easy to design a substantial point-threat: AI autonomous weapons for example. It's another thing to design a universal, all-consuming threat which prevails over any and all human countermeasures.

All existing AI systems - all our technological products - are strictly parasitic on our existing human global economy. Without that they can't power themselves, repair themselves or reproduce themselves. 

In principle, we can imagine a totally self-reproducing robot community-economy. If it had sufficient means of military aggression and defence, then we're simply positing a species like ourselves (in some possibly improved variant) implemented in metal/silicon or protoplasm depending on the engineering pros and cons.

Since we would be competing in-niche for land, resources and sources of energy, we would have to fight these aliens for our survival. But defeat is not foredoomed, not if we were paying attention all along.

In any case, I say to the misanthropes out there, we are centuries away from that future. You won't live to conceptualise, let alone design, that possible road to human extinction.

My advice? Stick to the viruses. 

Or go design the irresistible (but sterile) android life-partners - trust me, no one will stop you there.

What we think of when we think of death

The soldier: the first one can be hard; after that it's pretty easy.

The dualist: there may be some connection between the person I feel myself to be and the squidgy mass of cells-in-soup inside my skull - but the same thing?!

The neuroscientist: it's process - the mind is what the brain does; I concede we don't know how that could work.

The evolutionary biologist: natural selection has favoured the complex human nervous system. It supports sophisticated social behaviour in challenging, dynamic but mostly predictable environments. What's the problem?

The philosopher: to explain consciousness is categorically different to experiencing it. We both know you're in pain and why, but you're the one screaming.

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Me:

Sometimes when I think of dying I feel that a complex organ (my brain) will stop functioning and its constituents disperse into the biosphere. No big deal.

Sometimes I think that human subjective experiences are extraordinarily similar. Millions of people have sensations, feelings, thoughts and consciousness just like mine. My personal deletion in death is not dissimilar to me falling asleep and waking up next morning as a… slightly different person: someone very like me who is not me.

The human race (or successor conscious beings) may advance in times to come - or may become extinct. We all feel that to secure the former is worth any sacrifice (most of us!) but there is no evidence the universe is the kind of entity which could care either way.

The process of evolution ensures that we have to care - selection bias - so that's really no surprise. We each live within our individual consciousnesses, so structured that we have to care about ourselves and those others we take to constitute our mutually supportive community. If you like, those are the boundary conditions for being a socially adjusted human (not sociopathic, schizophrenic, psychotic, etc).

When we die, a universe may die with us and within us, but let's not be precious. The flow, the continuity of the collective consciousness of humanity gives me reassurance. Just like I'll not be too concerned about falling asleep tonight - as someone will likely awaken tomorrow morning with whom I identify.

Like most people trained in physics, I happen to accept the block universe concept in which the passage of time is a psychological construct, a product of local spacetime interaction between our bodies and the environment. In this sense the past and the future are equally existent and our lives exist in entirety - just as a DVD contains the whole movie, all at once.

(Maybe the universe is really some complex multiverse structure in Hilbert space - who knows?).

Anyway, because I'm a reasonably adjusted human being, I'm a fan of sensual, emotional, smart, prosocial consciousnesses having an indefinite, fulfilling future. I'm reassured by progress so far - at least in this branch of the universal wavefunction. These emotions are conditioned by my future-ignorance, of course.

And for reasons mentioned, I'm not too scared about the eventual unavoidable extinction of the personal consciousness of this author.

You, dear reader, will take up the torch.

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Greg Egan's short story "The Walk" in his collection "Axiomatic" uses this approach as setting. 

Roger Scruton in his book "On Human Nature" makes the distinction between being conscious and having a theory of consciousness.

And I wrote a short piece about this - 'Live Forever' - at sciencefiction.com.

See also Adam Carlton's short story, "Doppelgänger": memory discontinuity hangs heavy.