In an interview, Sam Harris recently stated that he thinks humanity won't always care – and makes the case for why we shouldn't care – if certain ground-breaking solutions are devised by artificial intelligence.

The suggestion that we won't care if a solution comes from A.I., as long as solutions are correct and solve critical problems currently beyond human capabilities, is based on a series of very problematic assumptions.

1. First of all, WHO should be allowed to decide which solutions we, as a species, are fine with having A.I. create for us? Right now, all of this development is driven not by a concern for what is good for humanity, but what disrupts established business practices, and lets a few very wealthy and powerful people reap the benefits thereof. These are existential issues for humanity. Why are we letting predatory capitalism make all the decisions, as if the only thing at stake is money?

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2. Who's going to evaluate and validate the solutions that A.I. produces? If A.I. comes up with solutions that are beyond the ability or the comprehension of humans, who is going to fact-check it? Another A.I.? Where does this end? How will we ever know that we are truly being served by the right conclusions and the right solutions? Are we really willing to accept that humans will not ever again be able to gain independent certainty? I fear that this lack of empirical certainty will send us spiralling into another Dark Age.

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3. We really cannot isolate this to the realm of extraordinarily complex problems. If we let A.I. solve complex problems for us, there is no reason to expect that less complex problems won't also be solved by A.I. How does that not leave humanity as a mere passenger in the determination of its own fate?

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4. If we accept that A.I. can produce results that humans are (currently) incapable of, we offload the entire potential for brain evolution to robots, and we WILL inevitably see a degradation and erosion in human thought processes. This was recently proven in a Carnegie-Mellon research study; the erosion of human thought processes was called "cognitive offloading", and it happens very quickly when people start applying A.I. to solve problems for them. Humans have evolved because we HAD to; our survival depended on it. If we no longer have to, it stands to reason we will cease to evolve.

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5. If we outsource critical research to A.I., humans will inevitably be reduced to studying A.I.s, to understand how they arrived at a solution, instead of studying the thing itself. This is HIGHLY problematic. Can we really, truly argue that actual human understanding of the problems we face as a species is unimportant? And can we really confidently say that we are comfortable playing catch-up with A.I. for however long we are able to? Isn't it more likely that we will eventually be unable to understand A.I. at all?

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6. At the point where we no longer understand A.I. or the solutions themselves, we have ceased ceded the ownership of humanistic morals and ethics on solutions, and have in effect made ourselves unable to impose them. Some may perhaps feel comfortable projecting that A.I. can come up with better solutions faster than humans, but do we REALLY feel comfortable suggesting A.I. will also be able to take over the application of humanistic moral and ethical judgment? This in itself is essentially the oxymoron of oxymorons – if humans are classified as inferior to A.I., why would A.I. ultimately accept human morals and ethics? And, by that same token, why would A.I. respect the value of human life? If these principles are articulated by humans, and A.I.'s adherence to them is dictated by humans, we are foolish to think that A.I. won't be able to circumvent any such restrictions.

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7. The entire approach to this dilemma is profoundly nihilistic. It suggests that we ultimately don't care about whether humans drive critical thinking processes, and we thereby KNOWINGLY pull the rug from under evolution itself, as if there are no moral or ethical problems with this. No other species has EVER done this knowingly – i.e., placed themselves below some other species or entity on the evolutionary ladder. To me, this sounds like suicide. If a solution means the certain pointlessness of your species, why on Earth would you ever want it?

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Sam Harris interview: 

• https://youtu.be/-DCLT3pIut0?si=pKCHt6TqNoYDpi2U

In this interview, Sam Harris isn't simply saying humanity won't care about certain things being solved by A.I. – he is using his own lack of knowledge about music to illustrate it, and suggests if HE doesn't care where music comes from, as an example, then perhaps noone else should either. 

But WHO should really be empowered to invalidate everything that makes us human? Art, poetry, music, theatre, dance, film, literature, comedy – should we just give these things up by "virtue" of mob rule? If MAGA doesn't want live theatre with real actors, should we cede that to A.I.? If Silicon Valley thinks it can do art better, should we let them extinguish a form of human expression that has powered our curiosity for millennia? If Rupert Murdoch doesn't like human-created comedy, should we hand it over to machines...?

I've illustrated this blog post with a quote by german artist Gerhard Richter. This quote perfectly summarizes why A.I. is the ultimate nihilism: it means the extinguishing of hope.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the U.S. Constitution is that it requires interpretation. 

You would think that if the law is to apply equally to everyone, then there should not be room for interpretation, since people will have differences in interpretation, and that opens up for unfortunate and potentially unfair fluctuations in how the law is applied. 

Enter the Supreme Court, whose word on what the Constitution actually means is supposedly final. Sadly, not even the Supreme Court justices seem to be able to agree on what the Constitution actually means, or even how to go about interpreting it. Hence the court consisting of a plurality of justices, so individual interpretations supposedly are "evened out". 

Problem is, these justices are politically appointed, and very clearly let their political and ideological biases color their interpretations. For this reason, we have precedents, where one SC supposedly sets a "final ruling" on the meaning of the Constitution in specific cases. 

But what do we say about a Supreme Court whose justices arrogantly feel that it is their right to dismiss the rulings of previous courts, relitigate cases, and in effect re-interpret the law? Is the law not supposed to be consistent? Why do we allow it to change based on political appointments and biases...? Especially when our political system, which ultimately controls SC appointments, permits money to affect political decisions. 

It seems to me, this utlimately means that not only can politicians and political decisions be bought, but so can the interpretation of the law.