I spent too much of my childhood reading science fiction and watching the various incarnations of Star Trek to believe that artificial intelligence is impossible. One hundred years ago, who would have believed in television, the atomic bomb, and sports utility vehicles? But just because something is possible does not mean we should do it without considering all the consequences. Take a hard look at SUVs, the bomb…maybe TV, too—waiting might have helped us all. Today, as far as we are aware, AI is barely gestating, and is far from becoming a huge part of all our lives. But the risks it could pose humanity are as many, if not more than, the benefits it could provide—at this time. While I do not believe AI should be abandoned completely, I believe that, at this point, for the good of the human race, its pursuit should be closely monitored and the speed towards it greatly reduced.

I start with the opinion that we have lost forethought. It is do-do-do, do not think, just buy, just watch, just work, go-go-go. We have 24 hour news, express lanes at the checkout, jobs that demand more and more of our time. We take shorter vacations, work longer hours, and spend less and less time with our families. In our modern hustle and bustle of activity, our efficiency and productivity in the American tradition, we do not think anymore. We do not research before we make our decisions, we just make snap judgments. We accept what we are told by authorities and the media, and base our decisions about our lives on a world that we have ceased to understand. We no longer muse, we have ceased contemplating our lives and decisions and all that surrounds us in the world.

But in our pursuit of greater technology, greater superiority, we need to stop and think again, ask ourselves the questions we have avoided. Do we need AI? What sort of problem are we solving by developing it? Whose problem is it? Who will it help? Who will it hurt? Will it cause harm? Will it do good? These are important questions, ones we do not have answers to yet. We need to pause in our endless headlong run forward and find the answers to them. Let us look at the possibilities of AI and see if it is really going to do us any good…

Proponents of AI tell us that it will save humanity. It is a grandiose claim, with ideas ranging from the mundane to the unusual. On the small scale, AI will relieve us of repetitive tasks and useless occupations where no mind is stimulated. It will relieve us of the simple tasks. Factories will no longer need humans to fix the assembly lines, let alone to be the workers who place the same part in the same place over and over again everyday for years on end. Everyone, from secretaries and receptionists to authors and authorities, will be relieved of the chore of typing as AI's with excellent voice recognition abilities will take notes, or transcribe every word we say. Carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress injuries will disappear as humanity is relieved of the banalities of real life.

Where is the harm in all this? People will have more time to be creative and to make their life more fulfilling, right? That is a great idea in theory, but in practice it does not work very well. The factory worker might be relieved of boring tasks that give him no creative outlet or mental stimulus, but he will also be relieved of his job. He will not have a way to support himself, let alone his family, in a world where what he was trained to do is obsolete. Will the factory owners who have replaced with AI machines re-train him and help place him in a new career? Probably not, since they got the machines to increase productivity and profitability. Will the government? They might have to, but at this point they are not prepared for that sort of task. Most likely the first wave of those affected by this AI replacement will be left to float, with few job skills or money to fall back. Secretaries could find themselves in the equivalent situation, replaced by the descendents of the Microsoft Word paper clip, who will transcribe and take phone calls and electronically file everything in the company, all from the safety of a box on the boss’s desktop.

The arts risk losing something as well. The craft of writing could undergo a significant makeover, whether for bad or good is a toss up weighted to the losing side. Humans used to write things down with our hands, pen and paper in a quiet room or under a tree, taking time to create each curve of the letters in dark ink. Our thoughts ran faster than our fingers, so we had time to self-edit as we wrote, creating just the right phrasing on the page. We may have lost little bits, dropped out as we concentrated on what we had thought before but hadn’t written, but overall everything was written down in eloquent prose (or the best version thereof). Then we discovered typing—much faster, though still not at the speed of thought. First draft eloquence declined when we turned to the keyboard, but we could not edit as we went, going back and changing a word or a phrase to get the perfect flow.

But what happens when the AIs start typing for us? They listen to what we say, which is always an unedited first draft, no matter how many cleanly polished "Captain’s logs" are read off on science fiction television shows. We could still go back and edit our work, but we’ll have lost immediacy, the moment. And we do not speak the same way we write—human speech that sounds beautiful can turn awkward when committed to the written word. Will an AI be converting our speech patterns into equivalent written patterns? Will we simply give up editing, and leave it to an AI to correct grammar and awkward phrases? If our worst tendencies win out, we will leave it to the AIs, and that essential humanness in writing will fade. Will our work even still be our own?

"But they’ll be our friends!" Some AI supporters argue. They will relieve loneliness and isolation for those confined to their homes, or who are painfully shy. They will fill the void for those who lack contact with humanity. But we have over 6 billion people in this world—you have to work hard to be isolated from them to the point of needed alternate companionship. At least you used to. Computers have already led to a degree of social isolation for the techno-savvy consumer. We are more likely today to send an email or message a friend on AOL Instant Messenger than pick up the phone. For some people, chat rooms have replaced face to face interaction in their social world—words on a screen have replaced faces and voices, let alone human touch.

The ability to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at a touch of a button, is wonderful. But too often that communication is dashed off, an afterthought. There are not the long political debates that you found in the letters philosophers used to send each other. The subtleties seen in the human face are lost, without the correct words to replace them—and email is the most passive aggressive form of communication. Now people suggest that we eliminate the humanity that has at least been on the other side of the line. They think we can replace the living breathing person we might someday be able to see, to touch, with an artificial intelligence that does not exist anywhere but in circuitry.

Perhaps they will someday be put into human forms, but they still will not be human. But I think of the countless imagined AIs of our fiction, and feel guilty. They were often more human than those around them, and while they are fictional they represent one of the possibilities for AI’s form. They present us with our childhood, the whole process of learning what it means to be human. Perhaps in that capacity they can teach us about ourselves. Looking at their development, and by observing how we look through their eyes, we may be able to better understand what we are as individuals and as a race. They would offer us new perspective on who we are, acting as no human anthropologists ever could. They could analyze our habits to reveal personalities, show the commonalties that all humanity shares, thereby demonstrating the folly of racism. Disagreements and confusion could be avoided—they would help the race mend.

But therein we can see another problem—we can not even treat our fellow human beings as such. Most of humanity operates with each other on an "I, It" basis instead of in an "I, Thou" relationship. In the self-centered world in which we have been raised, another human being is a means to an end, not an end in himself. It is racism and sexism and all the other –isms out there: we do not play nice among ourselves. Fights and minor disagreements become wars between entire countries, and things are not getting much better at the moment. Why would we want to bring another life form into existence? It would probably not be able to help the situation, and we are in no condition to raise a whole new race to be sane, well-balanced beings when we can’t do it for ourselves. Do we want something like the Matrix, where humanity becomes enslaved?

"But technology is neutral," proponents of AI will say, just like the NRA and its supporters constantly remind us that, "Guns do not kill people, people kill people." But therein lies my point. We can not keep ourselves from killing each other—the damage we could do a neutral developing creature like an artificial intelligence is tremendous, and probably irreparable. They would not be inherently inclined toward evil, but exposure to people and environments that reveal only the evils of humanity would not produce innocence. Out of a situation like that we would more likely end up with a creature that believes in the evil of humanity and none of the grace. It could easily believe in its own superiority and the obsolescence of us, its creators. But if it was given room to grow, to define its own limits and reality in an environment free of, or with only very limited exposure to, the seamy side of the world, it would be unlikely to feel as if our destruction was needed or warranted. Just as you do not sit a four year old down to watch Braveheart or Basic Instinct, the world and materials AIs are initially exposed to would have to be well planned, appropriate, and specially selected to create balanced individuals. We have yet to manage that in raising the children in our society—we are not ready to do the same with another race we have created.

Perhaps they could help us in health care, and psychology. They could be designed to give us the most accurate diagnosis possible, medically, mentally. We could learn from them too—doing research on how their minds operated to begin to make more accurate theories about our own. Except they will not have our minds. Recreation of the human brain appears to me to be an impossibility that we can not overcome. We don’t understand how they work—how could we recreate even a facsimile them? No matter how many Beowulfs they build, or other types of parallel processors, they will not recreate the human mind. When we create artificial intelligence, its mind will be nothing like our own.

Then there is the inevitability of progress: no matter what, everything is destined to keep improving, taking technology, science and man to higher and higher levels. If that is the case, we might as well accept it and go with the flow. After all, Beta was replaced by VHS, which was surpassed by Laser Discs, which have been supplanted by DVDs, and we cycled through records and eight-tracks and cassettes and CDs. But that has been a steady increase in quality, while the content has not really changed. Is that real progress, or treading water? AI will come from our computers, but it will not be a computer. There is a big difference between programming and intelligence—which brings up the question, how will anything that is based upon a program ever be anything more? How will we tell the difference between a good imitation of intelligence and real, honest consciousness? Blind acceptance of new technology is not a good thing. The inevitability of progress is a myth. We can choose how to go forward, when to go forward and where. We have simply been blindly accepting the technology handed to us for years now. There has been much good to come out of it, but there have been prices to pay too, like the hole in the ozone and global warming. What kind of price will AI exact upon us?

I do not generally raise high the flag of the forbidden fruit theory, but somehow, I believe there are things we are not supposed to know, not supposed to be capable of. We are humans, not gods, and I do not think we are advanced enough to create a real artificial intelligence, something fully conscience of itself, the world, and possessing rational balanced thought. Trying to create life is a very risky business, as Mary Shelley saw. It did not work very well for Victor Frankenstein, and it would not work out well for us. Victor initially created an intelligence—it only became a monster after he abandoned it. He abdicated his responsibility, leaving the creature to nature and his own resources, and that led to disaster. If we create an AI, we are not likely to abandon it, but could we create it to be pure and whole, without flaws? We may try, and we may come up with lovely approximations, but I do not think we can succeed in making a true intelligence that is not flawed. It simply is not the domain of humanity for us to attempt.

Heidegger is right…we need perspective. We need to look at the goods, and bads, and potentials for AI technology before we pursue it. I do not think we should abandon it, but think carefully before we tread. It is a perspective that complements Postman, who believes we have been seduced by it all, by email and voicemail, by the replacement of the pen by the keyboard. We do not really think about the technology that is ever present in our lives these days. We do not ask what we need to solve, we merely accept the solutions that we are given for problems we never knew existed.

We started out this class discussing the myth of Prometheus, forethought, the God who gave humanity the gift of fire, so that they might survive and thrive after Zeus had taken it away. But we also spoke of Pandora, a beautiful package (a gift of Zeus), but one who unleashed evil on the world. Her curiosity gave us disease, and fear, and death. I believe it is time for us to draw back awhile, to contemplate what we will be doing if we create an artificial intelligence. Though AI sounds fun and appears pretty, we need to be ready for what it may actually be inside. Will we be Prometheus or Pandora? We need to be sure we are Prometheus when we unleash a new intelligence on the world. We should wait and think and step forward carefully in our research of AI.

Nietzche said God is dead. I do not believe that, and I do not think we are ready to replace him yet.