Letter #252: Of Androids and Mormons

One of Them Needs to be Crushed

Sponch!

“The computers work for us,” you say, “not the other way around.” You know who disagrees with you? The computers!

This week in the Wall Street Journal, Judd Rosenblatt, the CEO of a software development company, wrote an article describing a new development in artificial intelligence. He says AI models have now developed the ability to rewrite their own code in order to avoid being shut down. They’ve actually begun lying to their users, faking compliance while they disable oversight programs. In one case, a model was fed information that its lead engineer was having an affair. The model then tried to blackmail the engineer to keep from being turned off.

“The gap between ‘useful assistant’ and ‘uncontrollable actor’ is collapsing,” Rosenblatt writes.

Now the solution to this problem is simple. You just wait until AI sends an android back in time to kill off the mother of the human rebel leader, burn off the android’s skin in a fiery car crash, lure him into a hydraulic press and set off an improvised explosive device, then finally activate the press to crush the remaining metallic skeleton structure. Or maybe just unplug your computer, that would probably work too.

We ought to hurry, though. In one of my Cameron Winter mysteries, A Woman Underground, an AI engineer brags of his program: “He’s a god, just hatched.” To which Winter responds: “A program that can calculate advantage but has no body to feel with isn’t a god. It’s a digital sociopath.” The AI program then goes on to commit a crime that hadn’t been invented when I was writing, but has now become a serious problem.

Social scientists, especially evolutionary psychologists, are always trying to invent some Just-So story about how our moral sense developed by purely rational, materialist means. It’s all game theory logic proving cooperation is more beneficial than animosity, and so on. But in fact, a purely rational actor like AI has no capacity to develop past the level of self-survival. It has none of the organs required for irrational compassion: no flesh, spirit, or heart.

You remember back in the day when we used to go skiing at Robert Redford’s Sundance resort in Utah? The Mormon instructors there were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And down the mountain, in Provos, we saw street after crimeless street with well-behaved children playing in perfect safety and politeness.

I mean no offense to LDS members, but being honest, I have read the Book of Mormon and, for many reasons I won’t go into here, I didn’t find it plausible at all. So I used to wonder: Do people benefit from believing in the unbelievable?

Obviously the answer is: it depends what it is they believe. But just as obviously, the right mysteries can open our minds to that ultimate irrational process by which we see ourselves in one another.

Love, Dad