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Chair of Sociology, ETH, Zurich; principal investigator, FutureICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis Relief
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Machines that think are here. The explosive increase in processing power and data, fueled by powerful machine-learning algorithms, finally empowers silicon-based intelligence to overtake carbon-based intelligence. Intelligent machines don’t need to be programmed anymore; they can learn and evolve by themselves, at a speed much faster than human intelligence progresses.
Humans weren’t quick to accept that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and they still have difficulties accepting that humans are the result of chance and selection, as evolutionary theory teaches us. Now we’re about to lose the position of Most Intelligent Species on Earth. Are people ready for this? How will this change the role of humans, our economy, our society?
It would be nice to have machines that think for us, machines that do the boring paperwork and other tasks we don’t like. It might also be great to have machines that know us well—that know what we think and how we feel. Will machines be better friends?
But who will be responsible for what intelligent machines decide and do? Can we control them? Can we tell them what to do, and how to do it? Will we enslave them or will they enslave us? Could we really pull the plug when machines start to emancipate themselves?
If we can’t control intelligent machines in the long run, can we at least build them to act morally? I believe that thinking machines will eventually follow ethical principles. However, it might be bad if humans determined those principles. If they acted according to our principles of self-regarding optimization, we couldn’t overcome crime, conflict, crises, and war. So if we want such diseases of today’s society to be cured, it might be better if we let machines evolve their own, superior ethics.
Intelligent machines would probably learn that it’s good to network and cooperate, to decide in other-regarding ways, and to pay attention to systemic outcomes. They’d soon learn that diversity is important for innovation, systemic resilience, and collective intelligence. Humans would become nodes in a global network of intelligences and a huge ecosystem of ideas.
In fact, we’ll have to learn that it’s ideas that matter, not genes. Ideas can run on different hardware architectures. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s humans who produce and spread them or machines, or both. What matters is that beneficial ideas spread and others have little effect. It’s important to learn how to organize our information systems to get there. If we manage this, then humans will enter the history book as the first species to figure it out. Otherwise, do we really deserve to be remembered?
