lessons from the wired

Kevin Kelly on Artificial Intelligence. I love this guy...

In general, I like Hans Moravec’s formulation that these are our children. How does one raise children? You train them for the inevitable letting go. If our children never left our control, we’d not only be disappointed, but we’d be cruel. To be innovative, imaginative, creative, and free, the child needs to be out of control of its maker. So it will be with our mind’s children, the robots.

Is there a parent with a teenager who is not concerned, who does not have a bit of worry? It took us a long time to realize that the power of a technology is proportional to its inherent out-of-controlness, its inherent ability to surprise and be generative. In fact, unless we can worry about a technology, it is not revolutionary enough. Powerful technology demands responsibility. With the generative power of robots, we need heavy duty responsibility. We should be aiming to train our robotic children to be good citizens. That means instilling in them values so they can make responsible decisions when we let them go. [...]

What is the most spiritual event we could imagine? A verifiable contact with an ET would rock the foundations of established religions. It would rekindle the question of God no matter what ET’s answers. I think the movie *Contact* is the only movie where a theologian is a star. But we don’t have to wait for SETI to contact ET. We will do it by making ET; that is by making a robot. In this way ET goes by another name: AI.

People worried about AI being an artificial human are way off. AIs will be closer to artificial aliens. Your calculator is already smarter in arithmetic than any person in this room. Why aren’t we threaten by it? Because it is “other.” A different kind of intelligence. One superior to us, but one we aren’t particularly envious of. Most of the minds we make including the smartest AI, will be “other.” Even in the possibility space of types of conscious minds, there are 2 million other possible species of intelligence than the one type we know (humans) -- each one of them unique and different as a calculator and a dolphin. There is no reason to make a clone of human intelligence because making traditional version is so easy. Our endeavor in the coming centuries is to use all minds so far (artificial and natural) to make all possible new minds. Meeting these minds I think will be the most spiritual thing we can imagine right now.