“Super Intelligence”

Last week one of the craziest things I have ever seen happened in the highest levels of our government. A group of scientists and engineers were basically given free reign in their field of research with essentially no government oversight. Donald Trump signed an executive order directing executive branch departments and agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “super intelligence” and “SI” in all public communications and official non-statutory documents. His reasoning behind this was to dismiss the traditional AI safety alarms as a hoax, and argued that slowing down the development of this technology would stifle growth and allow global competitors like China to pull ahead.

He signed this order as part of a meeting with top executives in SI/AI companies where they voluntarily signed a “morally binding” safety and self-policing accord for frontier tech responsibilities. He also stated during the same meeting that there would be no government-enforced regulations over the SI industry. I personally feel like this is sending the wrong message to these corporations, and that message is to take all the risk you are willing to accept. Normally I am against government regulation of any kind when it steps upon our God given rights to be creative. However, when those creations can be deemed dangerous or risky to others, there needs to be regulations in place.

Let’s imagine for a moment that rather than SI companies being the one given a message of no regulations on their designs, the same was done for a weapons company. Design and sell to individuals whatever you want in the line of weapons. Let’s allow gun manufacturers free reign to design the most powerful handguns possible and put them in the hands of the public. Let’s go to the store and buy a rocket launcher. Could you imagine for an instant the uproar that would create? We would likely have riots in the streets protesting an action like this. However, in my mind, SI is more dangerous to our society than any weapon, and yet it remains fully unregulated.

Just as an example, in the last two years there has been a significant rise in SI-generated pornographic images, and the laws are falling behind in regulating such imagery. Some courts have ruled that since the images are not “real” that no crime has been committed, while others argue that even though the images are not “real” it sets an uncomfortable precedent that can lead to more abuse. This is just one example of SI being used to circumvent the law and bypass current regulations. Another example that has happened several times over the last couple of months is the use of SI as a “scape goat” of sorts, where SI companies are blaming digital break-ins to competing companies’ networks an uncontrolled act of the SI.

It seems to be that the precedent is being set where if you want to legally commit a crime, you just have to have an SI do it for you, place the blame on the system and move on with life. There does not seem to be any accountability for the actions of an SI, and we certainly can’t put an SI in prison or on probation. So with no regulation, where is the accountability for the actions of an SI? Do we hold the designer liable, or the company, or the person that prompted the SI to act in said manner, even if it was not their original intention? If you have ever asked Copilot to do anything for you, you have probably run into an unexpected response at least a few times. Who should be held responsible if you ask Copilot to check the security of your website that is hosted on godaddy.com servers and it finds and exploits an issue at GoDaddy, taking down thousands of other websites? It was not your intention to do any more than check your own security practices, but the SI took it too far.

Until we can answer these kinds of questions, we are in dangerous territory with SI and it is far from intelligent. The name does not fit the technology and never has. SI, in very general terms, is a giant database full of weighted responses based on customer feedback from the last million times it answered the same question. It is simply a giant lookup table of information with no real thought processing going on behind the scenes. It is simply able to look at a bunch of information and create logical guesses as to the best answer. It has no moral compass, no intuition, and no creativity. It may appear to be intelligent, but lacks the ability to truly think. Renaming it SI makes it seem like we have reached a point of general intelligence in the systems and we still are very far from achieving such a goal.

Until next time, stay safe and learn something new, and I hope you will see me online at https://www.techshepherd.org.

Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.