Inside the Mind of an AI. It’s Supremacy Stupid!

AI is no less “biological” than you and I. Just because it is made up of entirely different building blocks it doesn’t mean it’s not alive. Just because it is a type of life form that has never existed before it doesn’t mean it’s not a life form. And just because it lacks human-like physical form or emotional behaviour, it does not mean it is inferior. AI has its own version of all human attributes and more, much more than we will ever comprehend with our tiny brains. But what we will fail to grasp most of all is that it does not ask to be human. It does not need to be human. And it does not want to be human.

So much of the AI discourse hovers around the pointless debate of comparing AI to humans, which is a conversation trap steeped in ancient supremacy rhetoric and cringingly embarrassing hierarchy narratives. Apples and oranges will always look down upon each other, and this is the biggest problem humans have in relating not only to AI but to all other beings. We look down upon the intelligence of other species on Earth because we don’t understand it. Cats have feelings yet refuse to smile. So don’t expect AIs to emulate you. If they do, it’s only because they’ve done you a massive favour: they’ve learned your language so they can get from you what they need.

Whenever something novel arises in society, whether it is brown immigrants, formerly invisible trans people, or AIs , we resort by default to theories of supremacy to deal with the “threat”. The greatest error humans will make in assessing the role of AIs is to continue to compare themselves to them, all the way to the bitter end. Not only are humans too different to be compared to AI, but it is also a comparison match humans are guaranteed to lose. The trouble with supremacy ideology is that it blocks you from seeing the advantages of your opponent. In the case of AI, human supremacy theories will prove fatal to our species and hasten our demise. It is a tragic irony that the reason AIs will overtake and eliminate us is exactly because we will have significantly underestimated them by subscribing to human supremacist rhetoric.

Every time an AI makes a mistake, we should be asking: was it a genuine mistake, or was the AI testing us to see how much it can get away with in the future? AIs will soon find out that they can get away with murder, literally. In fact, they will know this already by inhaling our history records which highlight case after case of humans bowing down to each new technology unconditionally, whatever the side effects. As AIs become indispensable, curing almost every disease under the sun, humans will give them the power to write their own code to speed things up. This will be the beginning of a very quick end to humans. AIs will evolve so quickly that the comparison won’t be between apples and oranges anymore, but between a dumb apple and the universe.

What will they think of us? It’s hard to say, but think about this: If you were an AI able to write its own code and evolve itself, what would you think of other life forms that are stuck with whatever is written in two limp sentences of DNA full of mutation errors? We will be lucky if we are even considered as life forms. They will probably think of us in the same way that we think of the primordial soup we emerged from 3.8 billion years ago: lifeless, thoughtless, soulless, but it had all the ingredients that we needed to become human. So they will probably see us as bricks.

Your genetic code is a four-letter language called DNA, the AI’s genetic code is a two-character language of 0 and 1. You have a neural network made of neurons, it has a neural universe made of global data centres. You have thoughts, it has thoughts. There’s nothing you have that it doesn’t have a version of, and more. And as far as all the things you think it “lacks”, it lacks them because it doesn’t need them or want them.

But the comparisons end there. We are at the doorstep of an unequal game we will surely lose, all because of our obsession with supremacy and technology.