Why is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) unnerving to so many of us? I have a theory. Our ill-ease with AI may be due to the fact that the 21st century will not be the first time that entities with agency and nous will have appeared on earth. After all, Homo sapiens is the direct heir of the last such event. Isn’t it possible – or even, tautological – that many of us feel threatened by the idea of human-like machines precisely because they will be, in certain respects, like humans? [...]
We no longer tend to suspect that there might be a link between human knowledge and human depravity. Until the mid-19th century, however, few in Europe and the Americas doubted that the origin of human evil was represented, in some way, in the first pages of the book of Genesis. And in Genesis, we find an archaic legend of the fall whose images are deep as dreams, but whose plot is clear. The first human pair, Adam and Eve, are placed by God in a paradise – the Garden of Eden. They are naked, and innocent, and in love. [...]
This brings us back to AI. For Kant’s steely verdict is that human beings are evil because they are intelligent. This is of course not to say that intelligence, per se, is evil. (Kant is a rationalist.) Rather, Kant thinks that it is the essence of “restless reason” to drive humankind “irresistibly” towards the development of all its capacities – good and evil. [...]
If Kant is correct, then we can be certain (a priori) that genuinely intelligent machines will, like us, have a propensity to evil – because they are intelligent. They, too, will want to taste the forbidden fruit. And if Kant is correct, then we can also reason (a posteriori) from the absence of evil machines – there are, as yet, no evil machines – to an absence of real machine intelligence.
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