THE AI-SINGULARITY

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 34th revised edition of Malleus Maleficus, The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report intrusiveness or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com  To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .  

        “I’ve been authorised to question you,” said the man who introduced himself as Michael Mosley. Wearing a crisp pink shirt (collar turned up in the Byronic manner), he deftly identified himself as a co-author of the neuro-scientific army manual on counterinsurgency  entitled Inside the Human Brain. He also wanted to impress upon me that Professor Stephen Hawking had not been alone in his concern about the growing power of artificial intelligence.  Cambridge's centre  for “Terminator Studies”-“the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse”- already warned of super-intelligent robots  that could one day become a threat to humanity.

               Of all the  suckers I have known…!

            “Doctorates in philosophy are no defence against subliminal infiltration,” I said, thinking of those peerless academics who could manufacture 'artificial intelligence safety protocols' at will but were utterly clueless about the human mind,  particularly their own.  Some might even say that if you were asking Lord

Rees, the Astronomer Royal who co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge,  or Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell professor of philosophy, for advice about the future you were deeply in trouble. As Stephen Hawking said - his words not mine -  'pollution and human stupidity' remain the biggest threat to mankind. As indeed, it was this very - how shall I put it? - 'witlessness' that led the same Stephen Hawking and more than 1,000 scientists to sign an open letter, warning of the dangers of a “military AI arms race” and calling for an outright ban on “offensive autonomous weapons”.[1]

            Talk about confusing the symptoms with the cause!

         The demographic capacity of planet Earth has reached its very limit. It is a mathematical certainty, enhanced by the scope of technology, that more people are going to die. The world’s population increases by well over 1 million net every single week,

and the blood-letting will be unrelenting. But it will most certainly not be an effect of the ‘military AI arms race,’ although some middle-class ethicist, such as the authors of this open letter, are happy to believe that it is. In fact, the entire AI “autonomous weapons” ideology,  based as it is on a comically inverse view of cause and effect,  will either swallow this high-minded scientific generation whole or disappear up its own arse.[2]

             Mosley had fallen silent, surprised by my vehemence.

            “You may not agree,” I said, “but  even in its sleeping chrysalis state the ‘runaway explosion’ of AI that Stephen Hawking refers to, has already absorbed most of the professorial chairs at British universities. The truth is, that we are evolving a new form of collective intelligence. You may cling to the idea of voice-activated robot butlers going rogue, or powerful enough to shut down the Internet, take  over Air traffic control, and hijack all e-commerce around the world, but as an aggregate, a digitalised stratum of the collective psyche, artificial intelligence has opened up intriguing possibilities in quantum information processes, cryptography and subliminal mass-indoctrination.  The very foundations of humanity have been taken. Mindsets have been

datafied. If the intention was to construct a silicone-based mathematical machine whose one purpose it is to serve man, it already has the grasp of a superimposed digital predator which has intelligence, resolutions and intentions as a predator. The simple fact of the matter is, that every day the world is guided less directly by human intervention and more directly by algorithmic machines plugging unseen correlations into computers of incredible power. Machines with collective needs and wants at a much higher level than the human mind can operate. Guided by a living artificial intelligence that, like an enormous brain, networks directly with the weird world of quantum algorithmic theory - even if Lord Rees and Huw Price have no idea what I am talking about.  Executive power now belongs to an impersonal process outside human grasp and control. I won’t lie to you, Mosley, the idea that a human being can just unplug the machines when they start to go psycho is a retard's fantasy!”  

            Mosley was awestruck. "Laurent Orseau from Google DeepMind and Stuart Armstrong from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University should be told immediately," he said. "They actually proposed that all AIs should have a built-in 'kill-switch', allowing humans to override them before they do anything catastrophic." [3]

            "As an exercise in intellectual futility," I said, "that takes the biscuit!" 
Bear in mind that UK road accidents cause no fewer than 3,000 deaths a year. But nobody in our time has the collective resolve to give an adequate remedial response to it. Frankly I'm bewildered as to the real point of resolutions passed by the European Parliament legal affairs committee to grant 'robots and other manifestions of artificial intelligence' legal status. But good luck with that. What they failed to note is just how much of this supposedly 'artificial' intelligence is already in the public domain!  

     German researchers may well be in the process of creating an artificial nervous system that will be used to make robots experience pain. But the truth is infinitely worse. Indeed, of all the truths on that disheartening topic, the worst, the most infuriating, the most damning, appears to me not to come from concerned parliamentarians, nor from an international robotic conspiracy to take over the world, but from a cloning viral mechanism that fuses entire population segments into massive 'functional' mega-cells, to be controlled not so much by individuals as by algorithms and capable of being manipulated according to commercial, political or ideological requirements. 
       The algorithms used to filter and direct ads to receptive audiences also determine what you see. More than 3bn  mobile devices, packed with cameras, sensors and GPS trackers, now control humanity! As indeed, I would find it very hard not to believe that the construction of algorithms that outperform humans in virtually any cognitive task, and which know you more intimately, indeed,  than you know yourself, will also absorb the very substance of a liberal society, pre-empt individual choice and abolish free will as we know it. So clearly, indeed, it is with reference to its analytical intelligence and controlling activity that – in Stephen Hawking’s own words - “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”And no,  not just by concealing an entirely new type of algorithmic activity behind the facade of an old mechanical "kill-switch" model, but – and you’d better believe this - by  converting humans into formulae and the intellectual product into an increasingly collective synchronization.      

   

"...massive 'functional' megacells, capable of being collectively, industrially manipulated!"

           

             

[1] Michael Hanlon, When the machines wake up, start praying. The Sunday Times 02.08.15

[2] Reminiscent of the  Russell–Einstein Manifesto issued in London on 9 July 1955, which highlighted the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, it leads  one  to wonder why a distinguished body of men would devote themselves to what appears to be no better objective than an attempt to reclaim the spotlight.

[3] Helen Lewis, The Future of Artificial Intelligence. The Sunday Times Magazine Sept. 18,2016.
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Malleus Maleficus is an advocate of English liberal democracy, and the  anonymous author of an historiographic apology of the British Empire.