Is AI Dangerous?

Man's Growth

There was a time where Man was defined as muscle power, i.e., in terms of body. The stronger the body of a person, the stronger his/her influence and position! 

Of course body power is always limited and Humans started to build machines that had more physical power, e.g., they could lift heavier weights or they could do things faster than humans.

Emergence of these machines was an identity crisis for Man but not that much because still Man had a mental power to dominate these machines and use them for his advantage. As a result, in some sense, he extended his body and replaced it with a stronger one, much stronger then the fragile biological body.

This shifted the importance towards Mind as software vs. Body as hardware, and Man got identified more and more with Mind. Of course, Mind was always important because only few in society could have strong bodies and others had to use their own Mind to gain an edge in survival game. But people got convinced more and more that Mind still has the power to dominate the body! A strong soldier is still a soldier and not a cunning king! 

This shift towards Mind resulted in the invention of computers where Man could use his creativity to build a universal Mind or program that can interface and operate all Machines around. As a result, a new era in Human history started where Man started to build more Mind power through education, science and discovery to be able to generate better programs.

The second identity crisis happened when computers started to over-perform Man in intellectual games such as Chess! This showed that although intuition plays an important role in these games, intellect alone is enough to beat intuition and the dominance in these games is just a matter of brute-force computation which Mas was not good at!

This was, however, accepted slowly as Man was still the programming Mind or creative power behind these games. In other words, although the computation belonged to the Machine, the logic or algorithm for performing computation and dominating the game still belonged to Man himself.

Finally the third crisis is approaching with AI + ML, where the role of Man as the Algorithm-Generator for computers is fading away. Although nowadays we hear a lot about big-Data, age of Data, etc. what is emerging through AI + ML is merely about Algorithm-Generation or Thinking power. Thinking is not a software but is a creative power in Man that can generate and design any software! Of course, progress in AI + ML happened through big Data but Data is in general of second importance and is like a raw material through which the Thinking and Understanding power gets abstracted and extracted! 

Now this crisis is not easy to resolve because Man as a Doer and Thinker is not needed anymore! Following Descartes statement, "Cogito ergo sum", i.e.,  "I think, therefore I am", mere existence or Being of Man seems to be under threat by AI + ML.

What is Mind and Thinking?

The nature of Mind is still a mystery to Man to be discovered. Perhaps Man knows more about the troubles of Mind and mental health issues than the Mind itself! To understand AI and perceive its role better, we need to understand Human Mind and its nature.

Mind is a "Thought generating machine" where each Thought is like a token or word emanated from this machine. It has two layers: 

1. inner part is unconscious part  which generate Thought.  We don't know and to some level can't know this inner layer and can only infer its existence as psychology has been able to do in the past century with pioneers such as Freud and Jung.

2. outer layer is the conscious part which notices and recognizes what comes from the inner unconscious  layer. This layer is equipped with 5 senses and whatever we notices is within the framework of these 5 senses as I will explain in the following.

One can consider a Thought like a radiation whose nature is NOTHING and comes from inner unconsciousness and then turns into a THING in conscious Mind. I call this radiation NOTHING because THING only has meaning within 5 senses and if something is prior to 5 senses it can be considered as something raw outside these senses and perhaps we can call it a NOTHING. 

Among philosophers Kant was the first person who noticed that our understanding is always through the window of 5 senses and it may happen that it does not coincide 100% with the objective Truth!

What I explained here is not a mental model and can be verified! We can check that when NOTHING comes to the surface it gets divided into 5 and appears as 5 senses simultaneously! To do this verification, we can notice that whenever a Thought comes 

1. we hear the voice with hearing-sense.

2. our eye starts to move and we can verify this movement by touching our eyes.

3. each though has a touch which we feel as a feeling.

4. if we put our finger on our tongue, we will notice a trembling in the tongue close to the middle or on the edges of the tongue.

5. smell is also there but it is very difficult for us since we have almost lost our sense of smell.

This is a very beautiful experiment to do and we will see that every Thought of NOTHING when comes to the surface translates into these 5 senses which build a THING for us. The information we receive from a Thought is mainly carried by hearing sense which we can Knowledge and also through seeing sense which we can call Imagination. What is very important to notice is that the information received through sense is not alien or external to us and is as if it gets absorbed within us and educates us internally! It was in this sense that human 5 senses, according to Kant, are perception factory where Man keep learning through them!

So basically Mind as we know is like a machine that keeps receiving information and keeps transferring those information to us! Mental sickness happens when there are too much information or to much useless information is transmitted from unconscious Mind and this makes conscious Mind sick and overwhelmed. 

If we do this experiment, we will see that conscious Mind always sends a request to unconscious Mind and unconscious Mind collects information and sends it back to conscious Mind as a Thought which then emerges as 5 senses in conscious Mind and gets absorbed with us! Of course, this Thought might be high- or low-quality and sometimes even useless. Then conscious Mind keeps sending another request to refine this, and this dialog between conscious and unconscious Mind is called Thinking which is the Innovation power within Man!

This Thinking is an ability in Mind and allows Man to collect information from perhaps a bigger unconscious Mind that lies beneath! It is like an inherent chat-GPT that we have always used even without noticing it!

A Big Mind Behind?

Those people who have done research and have stayed with a research question for a long time have definitely noticed the strange phenomenon that happens while interacting with the unconscious Mind, where after many interactions and idea development and refinement, its seems unconscious Mind keeps working on it! Of course we do not notice it because it is not accessible to us since it is in unconscious. But suddenly one day all the results come to the surface and flood into conscious Mind out of nowhere! These are those Eureka moments where beautiful results come and they always come like a flood of information!

This might point to the fact that we as Humans might not be alone as we think and perhaps we have access to an abundant of cosmic information transmitted through unconscious Mind! If we look at phenomena that happens in our society we may get a clue that this might be the case! For example, for thousands of years we as Humans had almost zero scientific progress and were living in a dark age and suddenly in the past 30 years an explosion of information has been revealed to us!

Even the structure of our society has changed as a result of the information we have received collectively from this unconscious Mind! For example, human right, woman right, supporting nature and echo system, animal right, etc. are all new phenomena! These things don't seem to come as a matter of gradual improvement to the problems we had. To the contrary, they were completely unknown to Man as if Man even did not know that he/she can have a right because the concept of right was completely missing from human psyche and seems to have just appeared only recently!

Scientific discoveries are also not an exception! It seems many new sciences have been revealed to us which have helped us to make progress in many new areas from health to science and technology! All these progresses are the result of discoveries we have made about new forces in nature which were affecting us but now they have come under our direct control!

What about AI?

Recent progresses in AI show that we have been able to discover two new forces or laws of existence: "Language" and "Logic". They always go together and provide a substrate for  understanding and sharing this understanding! Animals have also their feeling for connection to nature and to each other but their logic or language is very primitive! Although they are existentially very strong in their connection, they are not able to turn this into a technology!

Also Language and Logic are not obvious things! For example, if A ->B and B ->C, it is obvious that A -> C! But why this looks so obvious and natural to us? 

It is interesting that it was only recently that we noticed that these seemingly obvious things might not be as obvious as we think! For example, mathematicians made an attempt to make a Proof theory to make sure that the step-by-step mathematical reasoning through "so called obvious" logical steps taken in the proof for a theorem builds a consistent system of reasoning! And this resulted in a very complicated and contradictory results which even questioned the basis of Math itself!

If we look at LLM architecture, it acts as a substrate that can model the language or implement this logic! ML and Neural networks as we know are also mainly about techniques for generating "Algorithm" or a structure for reasoning  which can be trained and fine-tuned using data.

The situation looks like Electronic design where after discovering the underlying Electromagnetic law, we have built many devices such as capacitors to store charge, batteries to generate voltage, transistors to act as amplifiers (in linear regime) or bit-storage devices (in saturation and cut-off regime), etc. 

A similar progress is happening in AI + ML where we have noticed that there is a law behind reasoning and understanding from data and this law can be extracted and put into a mechanical use to make a technology out of it!

What is for sure is that AI + ML is not the end to the human Mind but itself is built based on nature laws which are conceivable to Human Mind. So these progresses are happening within Human Mind and they are not going to replace the Human Mind in any way!

It is very interesting that at the start of the century, mathematicians also tried to reduce the human mind into logic but ultimately failed! The motivation behind this was to find a firm basis for axiomatic approach to mathematics. But later progresses clearly showed that all these constructs ultimately need to be evaluated within Human Mind and there is no way that they can replace the Human Mind.

Danger of AI

As all things created by Human Mind, AI can be also useful or harmful but this would depend on its use and not intrinsically on AI itself. 

For example, progress in atomic energy showed that flood of energy is always available in nature but ultimately it was human decision to make an atomic bomb and use this energy in negative direction!

Internet itself in another example which allowed building an inter-connected world which as we know allows both constructive or destructive activity equally and has no intrinsic bias towards being good or bad per se.

Energy is always pure and its good or bad use always depends on human mind and intentions! AI is not an exception! 

AI is powerful since it allows building Thinking and Logic power on top of data in many areas! This is capable of doing many mechanical things that people used to do with their body and even their Mind! The step-by-step method humans follows to understand and do things can be definitely done by AI! 

Now AI power for understanding and algorithm generation for performing tasks be used to replace people, fire them, and change the work market infrastructure or vice versa to build a better world!

The next steps also depend on human intention and not on AI itself:

1. We can eliminate work and create more free time for people! Even we can pay people to go and have fun and build a completely different society than the work-limited society we have now.

2. We can also use this to control people and force them to obey and if not cut their salary and eliminate them completely!

But these are things that have nothing to do with AI per se and only depend on humans! A new energy and power source is discovered and how it is going to be channeled and used is up to human intention!

Can AI replace Humans?

AI cannot be a replacement for Human Mind: Mind will grow perhaps forever and will discover new laws in nature as it progresses! Like a fractal that has infinite and never-ending innovation at deeper and deeper scales! Perhaps there will come a time that Man will be even capable of controlling echo-system, planet, solar system or even beyond since they all seem to work based on laws that are not far from human understanding!

But very similar to atomic energy that completely changed War-politics and made it meaningless to fight and have war, AI perhaps will be an end to Work-politics. The former was an ignorant attempt to collect as much land as possible and the latter is perhaps another ignorant attempt to gain as much money, rank, and recognition as possible!

Ultimately, Earth is a closed system and can be organized in many possible ways for human life! It had a different shape a century ago ana a completely different shape now and will have a yet completely different shape in future!

There was a time where having a king was considered the only possible way because having security was more important and there is a time like now where democracy and voting looks the only obvious reality so that everybody gets an equal right through voting! [And by the way, democracy itself was working quite well until maybe 10 years ago but tends to be a very dangerous system as we witness it recently! And perhaps it will be replaced with a better system that meets humans needs better!]

Similarly, Work-politics was just a methodology to build a society based on work, money, etc. so ultimately just a system! Now with AI as a new force, this system should change and get adapted to a new shape of life!

The main danger is perhaps to channel the new force to the old structure which will definitely result in a collapse and chaos! 

This is what we witnessed with the atomic energy! Of course, we were childish and did some toy experiments to make sure that it is really dangerous but we came back to our senses and stopped it!

The same will happen to AI as well! Perhaps some greedy people will try to fire people and create a chaos, etc. in job market but hopefully we will come back to our sense and channel this energy into a better society where we can work less and have more time for innovative and artistic life!

Why are we always so excited!

I am a researcher and when I discover something new, I become so excited that I cannot sleep for several days! But then I notice that so what? it was just a cool result and no need for this much excitement! 

The same is also happening in AI: researcher are so excited for finding something very strong after ages or working with primitive methods, something that can do anything they could dream of! Of course, it will take sometime but once this new force get absorbed within, they will also notice that AI is nothing special at all! Like Internet which looked like a miracle at the time but it has become like a small gadget at the human hand!

This brings me to the last part of this writing: Human Mind and Being is perhaps infinite and no THING has the capacity to amuse it for a long time! Atomic Energy and Internet are such example THINGS! AI also is not an exception! Of course, it might create some turbulence and chaos in primitive Minds but sooner or later people will notice that AI is also nothing special and should be merged and used like a small tool! 

Of course, AI like every other THING can be dangerous but that danger is only because of Human intention and nothing inherent and intrinsic in AI!