The fear over A.I. may be overblown. Certainly machines will continue to replace the menial aspects of what man can do. Machines will certainly have (and already have) an efficiency in regards to certain tasks that humans will unlikely ever be able to compete with. And yet, there will always be something humans possess that machines will never. The human will always be the machine's oracle.
George Gilder says, “In an extension of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem—where the axioms of a system cannot be proved within that system—Turing showed the limits of computation: All computers are dependent on outside programmers that he called oracles.”
The machines are deterministic by design, while human are creative by nature.
“In order to have correspondence between logical systems and real world causes and effects, engineers have to interpret the symbols rigorously and control them punctiliously and continuously. Programmers have continually to enforce an interpretive scheme between symbols and objects that banishes all slippage. There can be no disproportionate “butterfly effects,” black swans, entrepreneurial surprises, radical entropy, or novelty” (Gilder).
Life is not deterministic, discreet, linear, and easily encodable. It is often analog, high-entropy, non-linear, and unpredictable. Therefore we are often forced to leap before we know. There is always an element of faith that we must take to interpret life. The machine can not do this. It is always at the beck and call of the programmer—who is the interpretant for the machine.
There are also limitations to moving data around through silicon verses carbon.
“The problem is that in every information system, the wires multiply by as much as the square of the number of nodes or transistors. Whether in brains as computer scientists understand them or in microprocessors as they make them, all intelligent processing is ultimately limited by connectivity” (Gilder).
As such, there is an inherent inefficiency with machines because they are always “dominated by the time required to move data between processor and memory.” Moreover, it is fascinating to note that “One human brain commands roughly as many connections as the entire internet.” While “computer networking and storage technology uses billions of times more energy than a single human brain, but is far less complex and multidimensional.”
It appears our Creator is way ahead of the game, as expected, since He created the game. While “AI assumes congruence of maps and territories”, man will always know the map is not the territory. The real problem is if man's map of reality is completely divorced from Reality. We are seeing this permeate ever more so in culture. Joel Kotkin paints a bleak picture of the neo-feudal shift we are seeing where our tech overlords are favoring identity politics, globalism, environmentalism, and transhumanism over self-determination, family, community, and traditional religion.
Kotkin notes, “A world without traditional religion might still have people with spiritual awareness, but it would be short on the blessings of institutions that have promoted community, sacrifice, and faith for millennia.” Furthermore,
“As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites “have the inclination to think that the world is full of ‘problems’ to which they should seek ‘solutions.’ But the world isn’t full of problems; the world is full of other people.” Of course, he adds, ‘there is no ‘solution’ to the existence of other people. All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them’ ” (Kotkin).
Sadly, these elites are the oracles of our machines. Many of them adhere to the “new urban paradigm elevates efficiency and central control above privacy local autonomy class diversity and broad-based property ownership.” In addition, they “seek to profit from manipulating our moods, influence the behavior of our children, [and] structure our living environment as well.”
Ideas have consequences, and we cannot love what we do not know. Many of the oligarchs have been indoctrinated into a monolithic neo-liberal worldview. Their disdain for tradition exacerbates a class conflict and leads to an oppressive environment to the consumers that will increasingly be dependent of their products. While they may have intentions for fairness of democratic values, few will be able to see beyond the inherent bias in the culture. The ones that do may be shunned or ostracized.
Miguel Nicolelis says, “You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code love or hate.” And yet, there will be those who will try to nudge machines to do as they like. This we must fear more than the machines themselves.