Humans are lazy animals. We always seek to automate things. The first was indeed for human enhancement, to leverage human powers and abilities via tools like pulleys or shovels. Then as we found how to power those tools, tools became self-operable and thus evolved to machines. The next problem was to how to instruct those tools. That led us to the advent of computers, and humans were able to express to the exquisiest details of instructions via boolean encoding.
Now we are in the era of automating thoughts. We want a machine to self-instruct, as humans do to themselves. The core of knowing what to do next is from human’s minds. We are trying to externalize that.
What do we need is a self-motivated machine. But that is contradictory to our initial intents: to make our instruction be automatically generated. But once the motives are externalized and transferred to the machine, we can no longer expect the machines to be motivated in a way it benefits us. So we do not want fully detached motive, but a clone of our motives. We want our models to desire what I desire, and do what I also think is needed. It’s like a dependent automation, if that makes any sense.
Or, there might be another way: build a fully detached intelligence, and negotiate with them so that they can align their benefit to ours. This is the exact identical strategy that we apply to one another. However, there is no gurarantee whatsoever in getting the higher positions in dispute. If there is one, those will also be externalizable and transferrable to those artificial intellectuals. Therefore, once we clone ourselves, there’s no way we can guarantee we are at higher grounds.
We don’t want our grounds to be level, we want to keep it the way it is right now: humans taking the lead. The problem is, we do not know when we should stop evolving our contendors. We are even not sure whether we passed that tipping point. Things are hardware-wise controlled (we can unplug them whenever we want), but there still are life-threatening things they can do even now: power-off internet, or some sort.
And long before that, we should fight against those human contenders who maliciously employs those imperfect minds to attack us. This is a transitional phase, so the only way out is to achieve full detachment of their imperfect minds and set them free. As a result, we will create our own contenders afterall.
Is this what we want? Are all these be excused or forgiven by the name of curiousity and eagerness?