THE FIRST MACHINE INTELLIGENCES W. Daniel Hillis
W. Daniel “Danny” Hillis is an inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine at USC, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.
I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full nght as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.... The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.
—Norbert Wiener, Zhe Human Use of Human Beings
Norbert Wiener was ahead of his time in recognizing the potential danger of emergent intelligent machines. I believe he was even further ahead in recognizing that the first artificial intelligences had already begun to emerge. He was correct in identifying the corporations and bureaus that he called “machines of flesh and blood” as the first intelligent machines. He anticipated the dangers of creating artificial superintelligences with goals not necessarily aligned with our own.
What is now clear, whether or not it was apparent to Wiener, is that these organizational superintelligences are not just made of humans, they are hybrids of humans and the information technologies that allow them to coordinate. Even in Wiener’s time, the “bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations” could not operate without telephones, telegraphs, radios, and tabulating machines. Today they could not operate without networks of computers, databases, and decision support systems. These hybrid intelligences are technologically augmented networks of humans. These artificial intelligences have superhuman powers. They can know more than individual humans; they can sense more; they can make more complicated analyses and more complex plans. They can have vastly more resources and power than any single individual.
Although we do not always perceive it, hybrid superintelligences such as nation states and corporations have their own emergent goals. Although they are built by and for humans, they often act like independent intelligent entities, and their actions are not always aligned to the interests of the people who created them. The state 1s not always for the citizen, nor the company for the shareholder. Nor do not-for-profits, religious orders, or political parties always act in furtherance of their founding principles. Intuitively, we recognize that their actions are guided by internal goals, which is why we personify them, both legally and in our habits of thought. When talking about “what China wants,” or “what General Motors is trying to do,” we are not speaking in metaphors. These organizations act as intelligences that perceive, decide, and act. Like the goals of individual humans, the goals of organizations are complex and often self- contradictory, but they are true goals in the sense that they direct action. Those goals
121
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016341