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Artificial intelligence is dangerous in State, not private, hands

I was reading about the Three Laws of Robotics at Wikipedia, and for anyone who hasn’t read any Isaac Asimov, I highly encourage you to start with I, Robot and go all the way through Foundation and Earth. That’s 12 books altogether: five robot novels and seven Foundation novels, which he manages to connect to each other. Most of the robot short stories are fascinating or at least intriguing logic puzzles about the robot mind and the things that can go wrong when the Three Laws of Robotics are either not followed or followed too faithfully.

In the Applications to future technology section of the Wikipedia article, this passage prompted me to write this post:

Modern roboticists and specialists in robotics agree that, as of 2006, Asimov’s Laws are perfect for plotting stories, but useless in real life. Some have argued that, since the military is a major source of funding for robotic research, it is unlikely such laws would be built into the design. SF author Robert Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries, stating:

The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)

That paragraph comes from Robert Sawyer’s homepage, in his random musings on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Before I go into my mini-tirade about the anti-business bias and State-apology that pervades all of our society, I will give Sawyer credit for writing this, immediately following the above-quoted paragraph:

Indeed, given that a huge amount of AI and robotics research is underwritten by the military, it seems that there will never be a general “law” against ever harming human beings. The whole point of the exercise, at least from the funders’ point of view, is to specifically find ways to harm those human beings who happen to be on “the other side.”

He clearly realizes the military’s goals are only destructive and offensive, not protective or in any other way concordant with those of most of the rest of mankind. However, he also clearly (to my super-sensitive libertarian mind, anyway) conveys an anti-capitalistic bias that hundreds of millions of people, himself apparently included, hold.

It is the bias that a company can in any way survive, much less thrive, with practices and goals that are clearly dismissive of its own customers’ safety, and that they are incapable of seeing that that’s a bad idea, and that no profit motive exists to protect the safety of their customers or the public, and that in a free and unfettered market no honest and customer-friendly businesses would emerge as competitors, and that these forward-thinking, safe, customer-friendly, and general-public-friendly companies wouldn’t hold an immense competitive advantage over their backwards, irresponsible predecessors.

It belies his ignorance of history and economics that Sawyer uses the tobacco, automotive, and nuclear-energy industries as examples of unsafe and dangerous private enterprises, as these are three of the most heavily regulated and protected industries in the history of the United States. Statists might argue that they needed to be regulated heavily because they were harming the public; that isn’t a bad debate to have, and many have had it. I won’t go into it here except to remind you that many libertarians argue that regulatory (coercive) safety standards actually retard the process of safety improvements in a given industry because everyone (from customer to business executive) just assumes the government is the be-all and end-all of safety decisions and so the companies only do enough to meet (or finagle out of) government requirements, which is not the point the industry might be at if competition, supply and demand, and customer-pleasing where the driving forces behind such improvements.

Also, I’ll remind you of the point made by so many libertarians, which was best expressed by Frederic Bastiat (and, yes, I am trying to set a record for the most times one blagger quotes one passage):

…every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Fortunately for my point, I don’t need to prove that public safety is first and foremost in the business executive’s mind, because, to be sure, a lot of them are pretty irresponsible, criminally so. (Does our justice system punish them? Does it allow for them to be punished? Goodness no. That’s exactly why they lobby Congress and the various agencies of the executive branch so much.) My point is that regardless of how cruel, heartless, and irresponsible you want to fantasize private companies are, the State is far worse.

Let’s rephrase the offending paragraph, replacing Sawyer’s exaggerations and misconceptions about businesses with the reality about the State:

The development of AI is a funded mainly by governments, and governments are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards—especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch of every local and national government in the history of the world. Not one of these has planned from the outset to pay attention to fundamental safeguards, every one of them by definition is immune to externally imposed safeguards*, and they have each specifically and unequivocally rejected any edicts against ever causing harm to humans. This is because the monopolistic nature of governments makes competition and secession illegal, and the existence of government is based on forcing people to obey and forcibly extracting taxes from them.)

That is a much more historically and philosophically accurate paragraph. If you disagree, please leave a comment explaining which statements are inaccurate. Again, Robert Sawyer notes the more-dangerous nature of militaries compared with private companies, but he and hundreds of millions of other people fail to appreciate that the State in general inflicts more harm on the human race than private companies ever have or could, and they are reluctant to acknowledge it.

*Well, except foreign conquest, but I don’t see how that’s any better for a people than being victimized by their own government.