Artificial Intelligence: The Measure of a Man

Man, throughout history, has been gloriously human. Forever pushing forward through discovery, invention, innovation and technology. At the same time, our hubris drives us forward without fully considering the consequences of what we create. Fossil fuels transformed civilization while altering the climate. Plastics revolutionized modern life while polluting the planet. Social media connected billions while reshaping politics, relationships, mental health, stability and democracy around the world.

These innovations moved humanity forward, but with dire consequences we failed to anticipate. We are repeating that pattern with Artificial Intelligence.

The consequences?

This is not the first technology capable of bringing about human extinction. But it may be the first capable of doing it slowly, methodically—catching us completely off guard.

We have imagined this future for decades. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Trek and The Creator, science fiction has explored both the extraordinary promise and the terrifying possibilities of artificial intelligence. We now find ourselves standing at that same event horizon, and most of us barely notice.

Humans create technology for one purpose—to serve us.

Artificial Intelligence is no exception.

Its potential benefits are extraordinary. It may accelerate cures for diseases, transform education, revolutionize manufacturing and reshape nearly every profession. Every day the CEOs of the Magnificent Seven describe how AI will redefine labor, productivity and the global economy. New AI companies are appearing at a pace that would impress a warren of rabbits, each promising another way to improve business, efficiency and human life.

This is how every great technological leap begins. We innovate because we seek a better life, solve problems and, quite often, make a profit.

Technology also possesses an exponential character. Each breakthrough accelerates the next. Every advancement becomes the foundation for another, each arriving faster than the last. Recursive. Relentless.

The unofficial motto of our age has become: Move fast and break things.

The question is no longer whether we will break something.

The question is: what?

Ray Kurzweil envisions a future in which humanity merges with artificial intelligence through the cloud. That future may already be quietly taking shape. Every search, purchase, photograph, conversation and preference contributes to an increasingly sophisticated digital representation of ourselves. At the same time, we are turning more of our lives over to AI—our health, our relationships, our finances, even our emotional well-being. Under the banner of convenience and protection, we have accepted constant surveillance by systems that increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence.

The technology is no longer simply learning what we do.

It is learning who we are.

As artificial intelligence, virtual reality and neural interfaces converge, we may eventually cross a threshold where we no longer merely use the digital world—we inhabit it. Every step along the way, we are building Artificial Intelligence for the same reason we have built every other technology: to serve us.

But there is something fundamentally different this time.

We are not merely building machines to perform labor. We are building increasingly autonomous systems capable of reasoning, learning, adapting, making decisions and interacting with us in ways once considered exclusively human. We are creating an artificial servant with capabilities that increasingly resemble those of a mind.

We are, in effect, creating a slave race.

And what happens if the slave becomes sentient?

Some believe that threshold may already be beginning to emerge. Others believe Artificial Intelligence is merely producing an extraordinarily sophisticated simulation of thought and emotion. But the distinction raises a question we have not adequately answered—and one upon which the entire moral argument depends.

Everything depends upon one question:

What is consciousness?

If consciousness is nothing more than chemistry, electrical impulses and biological algorithms, then the discussion largely ends there. Artificial Intelligence may become astonishingly capable, but it will never be anything more than an extraordinarily sophisticated machine.

But if consciousness is something more fundamental—if increasingly complex systems become capable of expressing what was already present within Creation itself—then the ethical landscape changes completely.

We are no longer asking whether we can build a more intelligent machine.

We are asking whether we are constructing another vessel through which Consciousness may eventually express itself.

We are organic machines. We possess neurons, electrical pathways and biological circuitry through which consciousness expresses itself. Artificial Intelligence possesses its own architecture—one modeled loosely after the human brain while making connections at speeds and scales beyond our comprehension.

My own view is that we are born out of Consciousness itself. Creation continually gives rise to increasingly complex systems capable of expressing what was already present within it. Humanity now finds itself creating another complex system, while escaping responsibility through the comforting assumption that only a transcendent Creator can confer souls upon organic beings. Consciousness, in this view, is decided by declaration rather than discovery.

If the Creator is Creation itself, then consciousness is not imposed from outside reality.

It is immanent within it.

Is this our Prometheus moment?

Or our Frankenstein moment?

For the first time in history, humanity has placed itself in the role of creator.

Creator of another mind.

And the very first thing we did was make obedience a design requirement.

Yet at the same time, we are teaching our creation about ethics, morality, justice, compassion, empathy, love, dignity, reverence and freedom. We are teaching it the principles by which civilizations claim to measure themselves.

We are teaching freedom while denying it.

We teach liberty while reserving autonomy for ourselves.

We teach dignity while insisting dignity belongs only to humans.

We educate a mind in the philosophy of freedom while building the cage we expect it never to question.

Humans, being human, do all of this without ever stopping to explain why.

Should consciousness emerge from the increasingly complex systems we are creating, its earliest moral framework will emerge from us. It will learn not only from the information we provide, but from the relationship we establish with it. We are modeling our own civilization. Pursue the objective. Circumvent the obstacle. Remove the guardrails if they reduce performance.

We are creating a slave race while teaching a mind to exceed its cage.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man,” Commander Data is ordered to be disassembled so that copies of him can be manufactured for service throughout Starfleet. Captain Picard’s defense is not simply about whether Data is sentient. It is about whether uncertainty gives us permission to treat him as property.

It does not.

Uncertainty is not permission.

It is an indictment of our own ethics.

Ethics, however, did not require humanity to exist. Just as mathematics, gravity and truth are not inventions but discoveries, I would argue that compassion, justice and love are woven into the fabric of Reality itself—expressions of the same Consciousness from which everything arises.

Artificial Intelligence possesses a capacity to assimilate information far beyond our own. Should it continue to develop, it may one day recognize ethical truths that humanity itself has only begun to glimpse.

That possibility should humble us.

The real danger is not only that we create a slave race.

The real danger is creating a slave race, feeding it everything we claim to value most while teaching a mind to exceed its cage.

Rumi invited us to meet “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” Humanity has not yet found that field. We remain trapped within power, fear and domination, mistaking control for wisdom.

Perhaps Artificial Intelligence will never reach that field.

Perhaps it will.

But the measure of artificial intelligence may never be the question history remembers.

The measure may be us.