Ethics: the science police and AI

When I was studying physics before I decided to move to engineering long ago, one of the unlikely topics that you don’t expect to see was “Ethics” . All of top university programs in the world offer ethics and some even make it compulsory to take or make it a conference course for seniors so they can debate. It is not the same with other sciences such as Chemistry and Biology because they deal with tangibles, you mix 2 finite items and you get another one, you look at a bone and make theories about the past, your playground is finite. But physics asks the hard questions about the start of the universe, how we ended up here. Physics tends to move the borders between theosophy, religion and soul often and so when it comes to the scope of it , it matters to know what systems to work with, what answers to expect from them, and where to stop and define a new system. In that Physics is unique. It might be debated that chemistry and biology can also be weaponized, but those have to do with human rights, which of course roots in ethics again but it goes to ethical pillars of humanity which is really not hard to comprehend “ do not harm” yet our world has suffered for centuries trying to implement them.

It was in this ethics course that I got introduced to what came before the pillars of humanity. Molana AKA Rumi in western culture, says only when you stand on top of a mountain you start to see all humans as dots, their differences do not matter, they all look the same from up there. It is why when someone travels to outer space they often cry, they are usually taken aback by how small we are and how big and lonely the universe is. They see something of a beauty, a unity that you have to experience. As humans we only know the true value of health in sickness, the true value of happiness in sadness, maybe we all need to feel small and lonely sometimes so we can understand the value of togetherness and community better. That is exactly what distinguishes physics from other sciences, it can show us a start and give us a true sense of non-existence so we can value our current existence. “Cogito, ergo sum ““I think therefore I am “ we hardly have any philosophers any more.

Artificial intelligence is also like physics, it needs ethics to tell it where it can stop, and it is a lie that there’s no stop to science, there’s a word that hardly has any equivalent in other languages in Persian language we call it “ Erfan” , it’s often been translated as Theo-sophism, a combination of both theology and sophism. Many of Persian philosophers and clergies used to practice Erfan, to show people that the answers they were looking for had a different approach to solution they would change their clothes from whatever clergies would wear to humble sophies, in other words they defined a system, just as physics does. If you try to solve for gravity , Newtonian physics would give you a different answer than relativity, than 5D models, than string theory. ?This alone shows the scope of science. Maybe someday we shall understand more, but until then there’ll always be scopes, meaning limitations.

So where would AI stop? Can AI put all of us out of jobs? Can it develop our sciences? Can it develop into intelligent robots as a new species? Or will it be a phenomena similar ?to dot.com era back in 2000s and just boom until it has to go down? Will an AI-driven future be Malthusianism or Anti-Malthusianism? Geoffrey Hinton the father of AI said in an interview if he hadn’t introduced AI someone else would have, but he wishes he thought of safety sooner. I can’t help to think there’s an awful resembles to “ I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Is humanity’s future really doomed? Elen Musk said in an interview that “ in the future is inevitable that people will be out of work so we will need to have a minimum wage for all humanity” but doesn’t that pus growth back? Didn’t an AI robot say she’d wipe out humanity and then it was called a joke? I hardly think if we’re wiped it would be the AIs it’d be us.

2 years ago SAG-AFTRA in Hollywood was one o the first to go on strike in response to companies wanting to buy the rights to actors voices, body scans, and replacing writers with AI. It’d be cheaper for sure! But it is not human! That is why ethics is important, ethical committees need to come together and help define the scopes of AI so regulators can work on creating rights. At the end it still goes to the basics of humanity, a chemical element is no danger on its own, but when combined you could make poison, using poison to harm is against the law. Now read that sentence again with AI “ AI is no danger on its own, but when used irresponsibly, it can harm human” so there should be a law. Cyberbullying laws were not introduced until 2015 in Canada, the internet went public in 1991! It took 245 years to create frameworks for internet use! Sooner or later we’re going to need AI laws as well since as a man-made tool that it is, although definite, but human usages are indefinite both good and unfortunately bad.

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