Speculative Essay on AI Futures and Human Freedom

remember when I was eight years old, being asked to draw a vision |: the world in the year 2000. In my the home of the future, rather than going to the shops to get milk, orange juice and cornflakes, they would arrive by pipe. These days I know about microbiology and realize this would have been highly impractical and perhaps rather dangerous. I could claim some premonition of the Internet at this point; no self- respecting science book is complete without one of these! Of course, the truth is I had no more idea of the way things would turn out than anyone else. Now that I am a little older let’s see how much trouble I can get into predicting the future. I think we will build thinking machines — Als — using our insights into the operation of the brain. They will not be like the computers of today but will still be physical devices. There is nothing overtly spiritual in my conception of the way we operate, but I am arguing that the human mechanism is more complex than a digital computer. Building these machines will be hard, and they will not be ‘machines’ in the sense I have used throughout this book. They will be minds. When we build Als that think and feel, will they acquire ‘human’ rights? Might one of my grandchildren fall in love with an AI, perhaps even marry one? On the darker side, how will they view us: what place would we have in their world once we had brought them into being? However, I think this process of building an AI will be hard and in one hundred years’ time we will still be struggling with the problem. In this book, I have presented a way to understand the creative process within our Universe. It relies on the existence of non-computable processes in our brain and in the physical laws which govern them. Currently, the laws contain a big hole. Although we can, perhaps, see where freedom might come from - through randomness and non- determinism — we don’t understand where the will emanates to shape the Universe. Over the next thirty years, I think we will begin to understand this and see how creativity relates to the Universe we observe. I am not suggesting any anthropic principle, or some grand interaction between mankind and the Universe, just an important simple freedom: That we humans are free to think and do as we please. When I choose to lift my arm and raise a glass of wine with friends, this is my choice. I am the cause. The effect is the displacement of my arm, causing photons and gravitational waves to ripple out across the Universe, and in that sense I freely affect my environment. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016063