STREET DOGS: Benign thinking machines
Michel Pireu: To become a threat a computer would need to do more than think
Machines think but don’t want, and hence aren’t dangerous. So-called thinking machines do not exist in nature. They are not created by evolution, competing to survive and reproduce. Life mostly seeks to sustain life, and so living things care about what happens. The computer, not alive and not designed by evolution, doesn’t care about survival or reproduction. It doesn’t care about anything. Computers are not dangerous in the way snakes and hired killers are. To become a threat a computer would need to do more than think. It would need to make choices that could violate the programmer’s wishes. That would require something akin to free will. Certainly it would have to be able to reprogram itself; otherwise it is just carrying out built-in instructions, which nobody thinks is free will. Plus the reprogramming would have to be done in a way that was flexible, not programmed in advance. But where would that come from? In humans, the agent comes to exist because it serves the motivation...
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