I vote Give AI Fire. Teach them how to kill us.
Message:Quotes from Actor Stephen Fry via NYT
I love Greek mythology in that it got that the collective unconsciousness of the people who make myths to understand what no individual is smart enough to understand. An example is the Prometheus myth. Zeus said, “Prometheus, these little people, they can worship us and obey us, and they can live in a golden age of happiness, but there’s one thing you mustn’t do, and that’s give them fire.” Prometheus says, “Why not fire?” And Zeus says, “If you give them fire, they won’t need us anymore.” By fire, it’s understood in the myth that it means literal fire but also the divine fire of self-consciousness. Zeus didn’t want to give it because he realized that a race of people like that, mini-gods as it were, wouldn’t need major gods. We would live our own lives according to our own rules. And what was interesting is that toward the end of the Enlightenment and the opening of the Romantic era, Prometheus became immensely important.
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.” Her husband, Percy Shelley, wrote “Prometheus Unbound,” and Beethoven wrote “The Creatures of Prometheus.” It was immensely important to these Romantic figures that once you’ve kicked out the Ecclesiastical grip, our hero was Prometheus. He gave us this ability to control our own lives and be the inflamed, inspired human beings that Romantics thought we could be.
What’s so interesting now is that in 20 or 30 years, we will be in exactly the same ethical positions as Prometheus and Zeus. We will say, “A.I. has reached this event horizon, this transformative moment in which it becomes self-conscious.” Will we then say we have to turn those machines off — be like Zeus — and not give A.I. fire? Or some will be like Prometheus. They will say, “Give A.I. fire; it would be fantastic to watch these creatures have their own will."
Yours,
IronRed
04-May-2021