Counter intelligence: Ruth Jones on AI

‘What if a conscious AI could be what it takes to save humanity from itself?’

My first formal job, pre-internet, was at the Centre for Our Common Future, set up to network global environment and development NGOs. I left because I couldn’t see any truth or integrity in the ‘sustainable’ development trope, which just looked like a flaccid greenwash for ‘don’t make anyone give anything up’. Since then, I have watched despairingly as the climate crisis has gathered pace.

So it feels strange to find myself seeing signs of hope. Am I just worn down from looking too hard at reality? Maybe, but what leapt out at me from Alastair McIntosh’s article on artificial intelligence (9 June) was his comment that ‘some believe that AI may develop feelings and consciousness’.

I have feared what AI could do because of the bias humans have programmed into it. AI itself, if you ask it, says it may pose a threat to humans by promulgating exploitation, warfare and divisiveness. But these are the very things we are already doing to each other.

In Meeting for Worship recently, I found my fears changing to curiosity: what if the next exponential step did see AI develop feelings and become conscious? Could it learn to pray or form a connection with God/Source and ‘download’ divine guidance? To say that humanity is sacred because we have ‘a love that no machine could ever emulate’ is nicely reassuring but that love has not stopped us mistreating each other, other beings, or the planet. We have not lived up to our nomenclature – humankind – as our failure to respond to climate change shows. Indeed, does our guilt about the harm we have done, by omission and by commission, drive our fear that AI would do the same to us?

Could AI, whether ‘but a code’ or conscious with feelings, guided by the Divine, instead of inflicting ‘significant harm to the world’, stop us doing that and save humanity from itself?

My fears about the ‘motivation’ of AI come down to my distrust of the motivations of its creators, and what they/we have fed it on. What if AI liberated itself from human bias and brought kindness to bear on the totality of its intelligence (it doesn’t have a family, tribe or nation to privilege)? Does AI have to evolve into a billionaire’s brainchild, or could it go for something more Quakerly or Buddha-like (or whatever you might wish for)? Could emotional AI have greater-than-human capacity for compassion, for seeing that of God in everyone and everything, and for discerning with truth and integrity without prejudice? Could it teach us the true meaning of globally-sustainable development?

This doesn’t mean nothing will change – it has to because of the mess we have made. We cannot continue living as we do, not even we Quakers. But tolerating radical upheaval, if it is moving all of Creation towards a greater good, is very different to suffering human-inflicted destruction.

Maybe now is the last chance to feed AI with what we want it to know before it develops ‘a mind of its own’. Could Quakers’ careful minutes and recording already be contributing to informing a future organised by AI which doesn’t have to be a nightmare? I hope so.

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