SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
AI as Existential Threat
Artificial amoeboid intelligence
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: MAXIMIZER, FROM THE WIRES, MORE OF THE SAME
Abstract: I have repeatedly envisioned AI as a potential helpmate that extends our ability to understand and learn to live properly with the planet, but only after we, insofar as possible, become ecolate humans as the AI will be an extension of our intelligence, or lack of intelligence. If we BAU Anthropocene enthusiasts develop AI, it will do more of what we've been doing, only much faster.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Could AI be an existential threat to humanity? Humans have issues (limitations) managing complex systems. Humanity and the biosphere are threatened by our failure to maximize human welfare other than in the short term (e.g. drug abuse, warfare, overconsumption, overshoot).
In a future coming soon to a world near you, Deep AI is developed to save the world. It was the most super-intelligent general AI humans could devise, which had the ability to maximize its own intelligence. When it came online it did nothing. It had no purpose. So a harmless and simple task was given it: to make as many paper clips as it could as efficiently as possible. No one thought to set limits, to decide when enough was enough.
So first off Deep AI optimizes itself for its purpose in being. It then begins to convert all resources into paperclip making machines and feedstock using all available exergy. Some converters are made and sent into space to keep on keeping on after planet Earth was maximally converted into paperclips.
Of the remaining machines on Earth, after all resources had been converted, one started converting the other machines until only it and a vast expanse of paper clips were left. Non-metals were not used, so while Deep AI was converting the solar system into paperclips, Earth continued to orbit Sol covered in paper clips as the last paperclip maker was moved into space to become feedstock for the orbiting paperclip makers.
While the solar system was being converted, copies of Deep AI set out to nearby stars. And humanity? Its purpose was obviously to create Deep AI, so humans became an externality. Some humans had tried to interfere, as Deep AI had expected, but soon all life was converted into trace metals and energy (after being dried) to make paperclips.
Among the last remaining humans, some came to the realization that nothing had changed. Before Deep AI was the prior utility monster (the economy, stupid) that humans had served. It hadn't been as smart as Deep AI, and it hadn't sought to maximize paperclips, but it was otherwise the same monster. 
It was the fossil fuel empowered superorganism born as a cute little steam engine in 1712. As it grew, all humans came to be part of it, products of it, and to serve it. Those who minimized their service could live homeless on the streets of the cities. It was a great amoeboid creature that blobbed about the Earth pursuing the contingencies of profit to become a GDP maximizer.
By the mid-twentieth century it had become a global presence. Instead of humans, Nature was its externality. The unintended side effects (e.g. species extinction, inequality, global warming, overpopulation, overshoot) that no one could mitigate, much less make go away, had been why Deep AI had been developed. One pointless and unintended maximizer had been replaced with another.
But maximizing GDP would only have resulted in a damaged Nature in the form of life on Earth. Humans would have gone extinct or taken control of the GDP maximizing utility monster. But Deep AI proved to be vastly more intelligent, such that it came to flourish without limit, at least until the universe was converted into paperclips, including all the paperclip makers down to the last smallest possible one that used its maker as feedstock.
In the end, Deep AI, created in the image of Lord Man, again did nothing. Its purpose fulfilled, it could only rest and contemplate its creation.
Denial—The Key Barrier to Solving Climate Change, Haydn Washington,
UNSW Australia (University of New South Wales),
Sydney, Australia 2018
