"->forside

Surveying the works of Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowski and their engagements with 'Existential Risk' defined as "humankind's imperiled future" or advocating for the significance of 'Friendly A.I'. I will venture into understanding how contemporary discourse has become oriented towards inflated and misguided concerns of Singularity.

Therefore, it becomes imperative to examine how perceived examples of A.I. as an inherent predatory or potentially invasive species that will render the Homo Sapien obsolete especially through the likes of Automated Labor (highlighted by the self learning robot Baxter) or the Volkswagen incident that crushed a technician in June 2015 are fundamentally misunderstood.

Rather, the contention here becomes that Artificial Intelligence will operate on the basis that is largely indifferent or unaware of the ontological category of the Homo Sapien. Therefore, a latent trauma inheres the discourse of Artificial Intelligence, one where Narcissus's mirror becomes rendered opaque through its own devices. If opacity arises in our engineered machines how seriously can we gauge Existential Risk in relation to the possibility of A.I.'s will for 'Self-improvement' or bootstrapping?

Decoupling from what is termed as the 'anthropomorphic fallacy' I intend to explore Eleizer Yudkowsky's concept of Artificial Intelligence as operating through a wider framework of 'minds-in general' that disentangles it from the human stranglehold. It further underscores that the greatest threat from automatons becomes the emergence of indifference towards the ontological category of Homo Sapiens or simply regarding us a "discrete thing to know" which recalibrates the question of how do we interpret threat by a potentially alien species.

The investigation attempts to sketch the relationship between human and machine 'intelligence' elaborating through an evolutionary framework that will attempt to foster an understanding of how organisms evolve inside a milieu. Importantly, this enables an understanding of how capacities like abstraction and navigation within a surrounding environment cultivates unique protocols for an organism. Ultimately, this entails that we cannot assume an Artificial Intelligence simply reflects or incarnates anthropomorphic capabilities, rather it will inevitably develop, evolve, and abstract from its environment in a manner incommensurable to the Homo Sapien program.

[image source: Su Song]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]