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“The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Benevolent or Malevolent? Book Reviews

of Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand,
Enhance, and Empower the...

Article  in  Skeptic · January 2015

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The Future of
Artificial Intelligence:
Benevolent
or Malevolent?
Reviews of The Future of the Mind:
The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance,
and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku,
and Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence
and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat
REVIEWED BY G EORGE MICHAEL
In his 2013 State of the Union
Address, President Barack Obama an-
nounced federal funding for an ambi-
tious scientific endeavor christened the
BRAIN (the Brain Research Through Ad-
vancing Innovative Neurotechnologies)
Initiative. The $3 billion project seeks to
unlock the secrets of the brain by map-
ping its electrical pathways. That same
year, the European Union unveiled its
Human Brain Project, which will use the
world’s largest computers to create a
copy of the human brain made of transis-
tors and metal. Generous funding to the
tune of 1.19 billion euros (about $1.6 bil-
lion) has been earmarked for this effort.
These two ambitious studies could
create a windfall by generating new dis-
coveries for treating incurable diseases
and spawning new industries. Concomi-
tant with these projects are exciting new
developments in the field of artificial in-
telligence (AI)—that is, computer engi-
neering efforts to develop machine-based
intelligence that can mimic the human
mind. Concrete progress toward this goal
was realized in June of 2014, when it was
announced that a computer had just
passed the “Turing Test”—the ability to
exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguish-
able from that of a human. At a test com-
petition organized by Kevin Warwick, a
so-called “chatterbot” convinced 33 per-
cent of the judges that it was human
with a 13-year old boy’s personality.1 Two
SBN-13: 978-0385530828
recent books examine trends in these
areas of research and their implications.
In The Future of the Mind Michio
Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics
at the City College and City University
of New York, draws upon numerous
fields, including biotechnology, psy-
chology, evolutionary theory, robotics,
physics, and futurism, to survey what
lies ahead for the human race on the
cusp of what could be a quantum leap
in intelligence. As Kaku explains, the
introduction of MRI machines could do
for brain research what the telescope
did for astronomy. Just as humankind
learned more about the cosmos in the
15 years after the invention of the tele-
scope than in all of previous history,
likewise advanced brain scans in the
mid-1990s and 2000s have trans-
formed neuroscience. Physicists played
an important role in this endeavor as
they were involved in the development
of a plethora of new diagnostic instru-
ments used for brain scans, including
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI),
Electroencephalography (EEG), Com-
puterized Tomography (CAT), and the
Positron Emission Topography (PET).
Getting to our current level of
human intelligence involved many evo-
lutionary pathways. Previously in our
evolution, those humans who survived
and thrived in the grasslands were those
who were adept at tool making, which
volume 20 number 1 2015
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$28.95. 400 pp. $26.99. 335 pp.
ISBN: 978-0312622374.
required increasingly larger brains. The
development of language was believed
to have accelerated the rise of intelli-
gence insofar as it enhanced abstract
thought and the ability to plan and or-
ganize society. With these new capabili-
ties, humans could join together to form
hunting teams, which increased their
likelihood of survival and passing on
their genes. The increase in intelligence
and expressive capabilities led to the
emergence of politics as humans formed
factions to vie for control of the tribe.
What was essential to this progress was
the ability to anticipate the future.
Whereas animals create a model of the
world in relation to space and one an-
other, Kaku develops a “space-time
theory of consciousness” for human
psychology implying that humans, un-
like other animals, create a model of the
world in relation to time, both forward
and backward. He argues that humans
are alone in the animal kingdom in un-
derstanding the concept of tomorrow.
Thus the human brain can be character-
ized as an “anticipation machine.”
Kaku employs the metaphor of a
CEO for how the human brain func-
tions, in which numerous parties in a
corporation clamor for the attention of
the chief executive officer. The notion
of a singular “I” making all of our deci-
sions continuously is an illusion cre-
ated by our subconscious minds, says
Kaku; instead, consciousness amounts
to a maelstrom of events distributed
throughout our brains. When one com-
peting process trumps the others, the
WWW.S KEPTI C .COM 57
 R E V IE WS
brain rationalizes the outcome after the
fact and concocts the impression that a
single “self” decided the outcome.
Genetic engineering might some-
day be used to enhance human intelli-
gence. By manipulating only a handful
of genes, it could be possible to increase
our I.Q. Brain research suggests that a
series of genes acting together in com-
plex ways is responsible for the human
intellect. There’s an upper ceiling for
how smart we could become based on
the laws of physics, however, as Kaku
notes, nature has limited the growth
and development of our brains. For a va-
riety of reasons, it is not physically feasi-
ble to increase human brain size and
add to the length of neurons. Thus, he
says, any further enhancement of intelli-
gence must come from external means.
In the field of medicine, brain re-
search could increase longevity and en-
hance the quality of life for many
patients. Engineers are currently work-
ing to create a “robo-doc,” which could
screen people and give basic medical
advice with 99 percent accuracy almost
for free. Such a device could do much
to bring down accelerating healthcare
costs. Through the fusion of robotics
and brain research, paralyzed patients
could one day use telekinesis to move
artificial limbs. Complete exoskeletons
would enable paraplegics to walk about
and function like whole people. Taking
this principle a step further, people
could control androids from pods and
live their lives through attractive alter
egos in the style of the 2009 movie Sur-
rogates starring Bruce Willis. Perhaps
AI may even allow people to one day
escape their bodies completely and
transition to a post-biological existence.
Funding for artificial intelligence
has gone through cycles of growth and
retrenchment. Initial optimism is often
followed by frustration as scientists real-
ize the daunting task of reverse-engi-
neering the brain. The two most
fundamental challenges confronting AI
are replicating pattern recognition and
common sense. Our subconscious
minds perform trillions of calculations
when carrying out pattern recognition
exercises, yet the process seems effort-
58 SKE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 20 number 1 2015
less. Duplicating this process in a com-
puter is a tall order. In point of fact, the
digital computer is not really a good ana-
log of the human brain as the latter op-
erates a highly sophisticated neural
network. Unlike a computer, the human
mind has no fixed architecture; instead,
collections of neurons constantly rewire
and reinforce themselves after learning
a task. What is more, we now know
today that most human thought actually
takes place in the subconscious, which
still remains somethng of a black box in
brain research. The conscious part of
our mind represents only a tiny part of
our computations.
Kaku asks an important question:
How should we deal with robot con-
sciousness that could decide the future
of the human race? An artificially intelli-
gent entity programmed for self-preserva-
tion would stop at nothing to prevent
someone from pulling the plug. Because
of their superior ability to anticipate the
future, “robots could plot the outcomes
of many scenarios to find the best way to
overthrow humanity.” This ability could
lead the way for a real-life Terminator sce-
nario. In fact, Predator drones may soon
be equipped with face recognition tech-
nology and permission to fire capabilities
if it is reasonably confident of the identity
of its target. Furthermore, inasmuch as
robots are likely to reflect the particular
ethics and moral values of their creators,
Kaku sees the potential for conflict be-
tween them, a scenario perhaps not un-
like that depicted in The Transformers
movie series. Finally, Kaku speculates on
what form advanced extraterrestrial intel-
ligence might take. Assuming that once
intelligent life emerges it will continue to
advance, then our first contact with supe-
rior life outside of Earth could be with in-
telligent super computer entities that
have long abandoned their biological
bodies in exchange for more efficient and
durable computational bodies.
Whereas Kaku’s tone on AI is
mostly optimistic, James Barrat’s prog-
nosis is dystopian to the point where our
very existence may be threatened by AI.
In Our Final Invention, the documentary
filmmaker warns about the looming
threat of smart machines. For his re-
search he interviewed a number of lead-
ing scientists in the fields of AI and ro-
botics. Although all of his subjects were
confident that someday all important
decisions governing the lives of humans
would be made by machines, or humans
whose intelligence is augmented by ma-
chines, they were uncertain when this
epoch would be reached and what its
implications might be.
Much of Barrat’s book is devoted to
countering the optimism of the so-called
“singularitarians.” Vernor Vinge first
coined the term singularity in 1993 in an
address to NASA called “The Coming
Technological Singularity.” The term was
then popularized by Ray Kurzweil, a
noted inventor, entrepreneur, and futur-
ist who predicted that by the year 2045
we would reach the Singularity—“a fu-
ture period during which the pace of
technological change will be so rapid, its
impact so deep, that human life will be ir-
reversibly transformed.” As he explained
in his book, The Singularity is Near, peo-
ple will begin the process of leaving their
biological bodies and melding with com-
puters. He predicts that by the end of the
21st century the non-biological portion of
our intelligence will be trillions of tril-
lions of times more powerful than un-
aided human intelligence. An unabashed
technological optimist, Kurzweil believes
that the singularity will herald a new era
in human history in which problems
such as hunger, disease, and even mortal-
ity will be solved. Based on the notion of
accelerating returns, if humans survive
this milestone, the 21st century should
witness technological progress equivalent
to 200,000 years. Inasmuch as techno-
logical evolution tends not to occur in
linear trends, but rather, exponential
trends, scientific development will ad-
vance so rapidly that the fabric of history
will be torn. Singularitarians anticipate a
future in which AI will allow us to realize
our utmost potential.
The singularitarian movement has
strong religious overtones, which Barrat
argues is overly optimistic. In contrast to
Kurzweil, Barrat fears that humans will
eventually be left out of this historical
process and relegated to the dustbin of
evolution. Holding extreme misgivings
about artificial intelligence, he warns
that the singularitarians are naïve about
the peril posed by self-aware machines.
The more sanguine scientists believe
that this process will be friendly and col-
laborative akin more to a handover than
a takeover; however, Barrat argues that
such an assumption is misguided. In-
stead, he avers that the process will be
unpredictable and inscrutable. He fears
that we could lose control over AI and
the results could be catastrophic. Hence,
the ultra-intelligent machine could be
our final invention.
As Barrat explains, trying to fathom
the values of an entity a million times
more intelligent than humans is beyond
our comprehension. Simply put, the ma-
chine will not have human-like motives
because it will not have a human psyche.
Though AI may harbor no ill will toward
humanity, the latter could get in its way
and be deemed expendable. He finds it
irrational to assume that an entity far
more intelligent than we are and which
did not evolve in an ecosystem in which
empathy is rewarded and passed on to
subsequent generations, will necessarily
want to protect us. As he argues:
You and I are hundreds of times
smarter than field mice, and share
about 90 percent of our DNA with
them. But do we consult them before
plowing under their dens for agricul-
ture? Do we ask lab monkeys for their
opinions before we crush their heads
to learn more about sports injuries?
We don’t hate mice or monkeys, yet we
treat them cruelly. Superintelligent AI
wouldn’t have to hate us to destroy us.
As Barrat notes, the way we treat our
closest relatives—the great apes—is not
reassuring for those chimpanzees, orang-
utans, and gorillas that are not already
bush meat, zoo inmates, or show biz
clowns, the rest are either endangered or
living on borrowed time.
Even today, computers are respon-
sible for important decisions that affect
the economy. In the realm of finance, up
to 70 percent of Wall Street’s equity
trades are now made by computerized
high-frequency trading systems—super-
computers that use algorithms to take
advantage of split-second opportunities
in price fluctuations of stocks. In recent
years, Wall Street has been using agent-
based financial modeling that simulates
the entire stock market, and even the
entire economy, to improve forecasting.
Barrat fears that the intelligence explo-
sion in the computational finance do-
main will be opaque for at least four
reasons. First, it will probably take place
in various “black box” artificial intelli-
gence techniques closed to outsiders.
Second, the high-bandwidth, millisec-
ond-fast transmissions will take place
faster than humans can react to them as
witnessed during the so-called Flash
Crash on May 6 of 2010 when the Dow
Jones Industrial Average plummeted by
1,000 points within minutes. Third, the
system is extremely complex and thus
beyond the understanding of most fi-
nancial analysts. And finally, any AI sys-
tem implemented on Wall Street would
more than likely be treated as propri-
etary information and kept secret as
long as it makes money for its creators.
In the near future, it is reasonable to as-
sume that computer technology will
have the power to end lives. As Barrat
points out, semi-autonomous robotic
drones now kill dozens of people each
year on the battlefield.
Nefarious forms of quasi-artificial
intelligence already have befallen us. For
example, “botnets” that hijack infected
computers (unbeknownst to their users)
and launch DDOS (distributed denial of
service) attacks are designed to crash
and/or jam targeted networks. For Bar-
rat, it would seem to logically follow
that as AI develops, it will be used for
cybercrime. Ominously, cyber-sabotage
could be directed at critical infrastruc-
ture. If, for instance, the power grid
were taken down it would have cata-
strophic results. As an example of the
great peril posed by semi-autonomous
computer programs Barrat cites the case
of a joint U.S.-Israeli cyber campaign
against Iran dubbed “Olympic Games,”
which unleashed the Stuxnet computer
virus. Stuxnet was designed to destroy
machinery, specifically the centrifuges
in Natanz nuclear enrichment facility in
Iran. Highly effective, the worm crip-
volume 20 number 1 2015
pled between 1,000 and 2,000 cen-
trifuges and set Iran’s nuclear weapons
program back two years. But as Barrat
warns, malware of this sort does not just
simply go away; thousands of copies of
the virus escaped the Natanz plant and
infected other PCs around the world.
Barrat warns that such cyber operations
are terribly short-sighted and carry a
high risk of blowback. As he explains,
now that Stuxnet is out in the public do-
main, it has dramatically lowered the
cost of a potential terrorist attack on the
U.S. electrical grid to about a million
dollars.
Perhaps in the not-so-distant future,
computers will be autonomous agents
making decisions without guidance from
human programmers. Moreover, the
transition from artificial general intelli-
gence to artificial super intelligence
could come swiftly and without fore-
warning, thus we will not have adequate
time to prepare for it. Once it has access
to the Internet, an AI entity could find
the fulfillment of all its needs, not unlike
the scenario depicted in 2014 film Tran-
scendence in which Johnny Depp starred
as the mind behind a supercomputer.
To be safe, Barrat advises that AI
should be developed with something
akin to consciousness and human under-
standing built in. But even this feature
could be dangerous. After all, a machine
could pretend to think like a human and
produce human-like answers it prepared
to implement its own agenda.
Kurzweil has argued that one way to
limit the potentially dangerous aspects of
artificial intelligence is to pair it with hu-
mans through intelligence augmenta-
tion. As AI becomes intimately
embedded in our bodies and brains, it
will begin to reflect our values. But Bar-
rat counters that super-intelligence could
be a violence multiplier, turning grudges
into killings and disagreements into dis-
asters, not unlike how a gun can turn a
fistfight into murder. Today, much of the
cutting edge AI research is being under-
taken by the Pentagon. The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has been investigating ways to
implement artificial intelligence to gain
an advantage on the battlefield. Put
WWW.S KEPTI C .COM 59
 R E V IE WS

simply, intelligence augmentation is no

moral fail-safe.

LEAVING TRUTH
Invoking the Precautionary Princi-
ple, Barrat counsels that if the conse-
quences of an action are unknown but
by Keith Sewell judged by some scientists to carry a risk
of being catastrophic, then it is better
not to carry out the action. He concedes,
I think that our most functional criterion however, that relinquishing the pursuit
for identifying proposals as knowledge is of artificial general intelligence is no
physical observation, repeatable on de- longer a viable option. To do otherwise
mand. What I’d like to understand, at would cede the opportunity to rogue na-
last, is the ostensibly more powerful tions and gangsters who might not be as
basis upon which theists seek to deny scrupulous in engineering safeguards
this. They must have one, as their defin- against malevolent AI. There is a deci-
ing proposals stand in direct opposition sive first-mover advantage in AI develop-
to our entire body of on-demand-repeat- ment in the sense that whoever first
able physical observation based knowl- attains it will create the conditions nec-
edge. Reality has no option for showing essary for an intelligence explosion. And
. us, more clearly than it already has, that they can pursue this goal not necessarily
TION the miracles upon which our theists base for malevolent reasons, but because they
I
ED their initial beliefs in their Supernatural will anticipate that their chief competi-
W
NE Beings never really happened. tors, whether corporate or military, will
be doing the same.
To make this challenge explicit, I am not Perhaps the best course of action
merely claiming that the theists are wrong. I’m claiming that they are would be to incrementally integrate
wrong by any criterion through which right and wrong can be coherently components of artificial intelligence
distinguished. This claim is a lot stronger, and it’s testable. For example, with the human brain. The next step in
if Christians can show any functional basis for knowledge-selection that intelligence augmentation would be to
validates the existence and power of Yahweh over his logically exclusive put all of the enhancements contained
alternatives (Allah, Vishnu, Wotan, etc.), or if Muslims can show any in a smart phone inside of us and con-
such basis that preferentially validates Allah, then my claim would be nect it to our brains. A human along
invalidated. with Google is already an example of ar-
tificial super-intelligence. Inasmuch as
Most succinctly, we have never been able to win at the level of “our AI is developed by humans, Kurzweil ar-
truths” against “their truths,” but I think that we can now win at the gues that it will reflect our values. He
level of on-demand-repeatable physical observation vs. our species’ maintains that future machines will still
common-sense concept of “truth” itself. I think that we have had all of be human even if they are not biologi-
the needed philosophical pieces in place, for about the 80 years since cal. To be safe, Barrat recommends ap-
publication of Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, to definitively plying a cluster of defenses that could
call the theist’s bluff at this deepest accessible epistemic level. My mitigate the harmful consequences of
book’s essays therefore argue and provide ammunition for such a bluff malevolent AI, including programming
call, between ourselves and all who still proselytize for emotionally se- in human features, such as ethics and
ductive irrational knowledge systems (systems that can only be propa- emotions. These qualities will probably
gated as “truth”). If I can get enough of you in own my camp to have to be implemented in stages be-
understand and help me to spread this call, then – like Archimedes with cause of the complexity involved, but
his lever – we will start to move the world. by doing so, we could derive enormous
benefits from machine-based intelli-
For more information please visit our website at poppersinversion.org, or buy my gence without being consigned to evolu-
book Leaving Truth as a paperback from Barnes & Noble; or as an eBook from tionary obsolescence.
any of the main e-retailers.
——————————————————————— Refrences
1. Chris Williams, “Ukrainian Teen Created

poppersinversion.org in Lab Passes Turing Test—Famous

Nutty Prof,” The Register, June 9, 2014,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06
/09/software_passes_turing_test/.

60 SKE PTI C M AG AZ I N E volume 20 number 1 2015

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