Originally published at: From Animals to AI: Neal Stephenson on Coexisting with Non-Human Intelligences - TidBITS
It’s always fascinating to view our current world through the eyes of someone who specializes in fictional realms. Acclaimed science fiction author Neal Stephenson is high on my list of authors to listen to, and not just because he coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. Twenty-five years ago, I shaped much of my thinking about digital privacy based on his keynote at the Computers, Privacy and Freedom 2000 conference (see “Threat Models and Domination Systems,” 22 May 2000). Now, in his Graphomane newsletter, Stephenson reflects on AI, writing:
Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren’t human is to consider the fact that we’ve been doing exactly that for long as we’ve existed, because we live among animals. Animals have intelligences of many different kinds. We’re used to thinking of them as being less intelligent than we are, and that’s usually not wrong, but it might be better to think of them as having different sorts of intelligence, because they’ve evolved to do different things.
He goes on to propose three axes on which we could plot these different sorts of intelligences:
- How much humans matter to the animal: Many animals are probably unaware that people exist at all, some clearly know about us, and others can only survive with our help.
- The extent to which the animal understands the human mind: Wolves and dogs share nearly identical DNA but comprehend humans in completely different ways.
- What sort of agency the animal has to inflict harm on humans: Sometimes danger is obvious, as with alligators, but a horse could inadvertently maim or kill a human, and a sufficient number of stings from small insects could also seriously harm a person.
Stephenson then says:
It hasn’t always been a cakewalk, but we’ve been able to establish a stable position in the ecosystem despite sharing it with all of these different kinds of intelligences. Perhaps this can provide us with a framework for imagining what a future might look like in which we co-exist with AIs.
He’s suggesting that we may end up with a diverse range of AIs that, much like animals, can be plotted at significantly different points along those three axes. The goal, then, is to figure out how we can establish a position of stability within this new ecosystem of digital intelligences. Food for thought.