What if Terminator was real?
This seems to be the point of a recent open letter signed by tech luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, pleading that the arming of artificial intelligence is ended due to the risk it poses for the future of humanity.
This is not the first time these names, amongst others, have been warning against the dangers of artificial intelligence. Hawking has been particularly loud about this recently, telling the BBC last year that he feared that AI could re-design itself to continually surpass humanity, once it became self-aware.
But as the scientific community frets about robots, the general populace seems to be more concerned about another classic sci-fi threat. A poll released by Essential Report this weeks suggests that a majority of Australians think that intelligent alien life exists in the universe. Interestingly, the polling was done according to which political party respondents would usually vote for, with Labor and Greens voters finding it more likely than Coalition voters or others.
Is there any connection between these dual fears? I suspect so.
Fundamentally, artificial intelligence is simply another type of alien. AI and ET are both meant to be something more intelligent than us, with greater technology and a superior form and function. Ultimately, their differences to us means that they will attempt to destroy, and therefore we should fear them.
Despite this, many who fear AI do not believe that there is alien life (though Hawking is a notable exception). Why might this be? I suspect it is to do with where these two 'species' could come from. Artificial intelligence is a human creation. It is something born from the world of computer technology, a realm in which humanity has made vast advances over the past century. For artificial intelligence to become self-aware and self-replicating would mean that man has managed to make something like itself, quite possibly being the pinnacle of human achievement. By contrast, alien life suggests the opposite: that there is something over which humanity has no control, no involvement in creating and no way of predicting.
Many of those who are warning of the dangers of AI have spent much of their life rejecting the idea of another power over which humans have no control, no involvement in creating and no way of predicting: God. I find it quite possible that the reason for this convergence of athiests fearing a human-created higher power, and the general population fearing an otherworldly higher power, has something to do with the drop in belief of God. For the athiest, it is human-created artificial intelligence that replaces God as the superior of man. For the apathiest, it is an unknown being, like us but also different and somehow greater, that replaces God.
This also seems to correlate with the general understanding of religion amongst the Australian population, whereby most of the remaining practicing Christians in this country tend to vote for the Coalition or other parties. Such people would also have no reason or need for another higher power, as they believe in one already.
The cases of the alien and the AI speak to both our imagination and, surely, our desire for something greater than ourselves to exist. Certainly, neither has any claim to being a reasonable suggestion at this point. Artificial intelligence is a long, long way from being able to do the things seen in film and on television. In fact, such things are likely to be impossible. Real AI can predict and act according to their programming, and nothing more. Aliens, on the other hand, seem less likely to exist every time we discover a planet so different to our own, so disordered and so unable to have established life on it.
Perhaps we are not the godless society we are often claimed to be.
It has been some two millenia since Cicero stated that 'nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.' It seems he is still right.
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