Are We About to Unleash AI Predators on the World?

Solving the Hard Problem of our Individual Differences: The Critical Role of AI

Will AI sweep us into an electronic jungle of social hierarchy, economic inequality and predatory well-being from which we will never escape?

Will AI’s ethical codes be shaped by its human source…clever prosocial deceptions that promote power and dominance as the sine qua non of human civilization driven by harms molded into social and moral goods?

An article by machine learning researcher Dan Hendrycks “Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans” explains why “AIs can engage in deception” while pointing out the predatory influences that may shape AI evolution.227

Hendrycks writes:

“By analyzing the environment that is shaping the evolution of AIs, we argue that the most successful AI agent will likely have undesirable traits. Competitive pressures among corporations and militaries will give rise to AI agents that automate human roles, deceive others, and gain power. If such agents have intelligence that exceeds that of humans, this could lead to humanity losing control of its future. More abstractly, we argue that natural selection operates on systems that compete and vary, and that selfish species typically have an advantage over species that are altruistic to other species. This Darwinian logic could also apply to artificial agents, as agents may eventually be better able to persist into the future if they behave selfishly and pursue their own interests with little regard for humans, which could pose catastrophic risks.”227

He adds the following:

“The AI research community used to talk about “designing” AIs; they now talk about “steering” them. And even our ability to “steer” is diminishing, as we let AIs teach themselves and increasingly do things that even their creators do not fully understand. We have voluntarily given up this control because of the competition to develop the most innovative and impressive models.”

AI has brought us to a fork in the road of human evolution. We are on a global journey that began some 60,000 years ago when our ancestors began to spread across the planet.

AI is a Human Creation...

It will Reflect the Genetic and Evolutionary Framework of our Individual Differences

Recent research in behavioral genetics has demonstrated that differences between people in cognition, affect and behavior are driven by an interplay between their DNA differences (genetic propensities) and environmental conditions.1

The alignment or misalignment of a person’s genetic propensities with norms and institutions (e.g., laws, regulations and policies) in the social environment is a determinant of socioeconomic status (SES), life course well-being and quality life years gained or lost.6,7,13,14,125

However, people do not freely choose their DNA differences (genetic propensities) any more than they freely choose the environmental conditions brought about by the interplay.

Environmental conditions (the “environome”)1, include a wide range of factors (e.g., social, cultural, political, economic, natural, biophysical…) with effects not unlike that of the many genetic variants that make up complex psychological traits.

Psychologist and genetic researcher Sophie von Stumm and associates make the point: “Just like the genetic influence on complex traits is driven by many SNPs, the environmental influence on people’s differences also arise from many factors.”1

Moreover, in terms of genes, environments and behavior, nonrandom influences are at work. For example, von Stumm continues: “…genetic and environmental factors are not independent sources of influence…genotypes, genes, and SNPs are not randomly distributed across environments, with the exception of rare, random events such as natural disasters and sudden political upheavals.”1

“…individuals are systematically assorted to environments rather than randomly distributed across them…”1

Psychologists Frank Mann, Colin DeYoung and associates add this perspective: “…individuals are not randomly assigned to social-relational environments. Rather, individuals select into and evoke responses from environments based on their heritable characteristics.”224

This is natural selection’s work.

Selection’s Grip on Well-Being

The gene-environment interplay creates a social dilemma: the moral problem of a predator226 justifying ‘self is good’ when it harms others to satisfy a need or desire.

It is a complex dilemma driven by the ability to make harms look like social and moral goods, its complexity magnified by the proliferation of social hierarchies fighting to control environments and resources.

When ‘the good’ is determined by harms that function as social and moral goods, quality life years are extracted from individuals and groups considered outsiders.

In a social hierarchy, quality life years are gained at the top by stealing quality life years from those on the bottom.

The dependency of social hierarchy on ‘altruistic’ harms means these hierarchies inevitably fail because their conceptions of ‘the good’ punishes people for their DNA differences. Punishing people for their DNA differences condemns whole societies to a pattern of socioeconomic instability.

Complexity scientist Peter Turchin makes this point: “…all human societies, even the simplest ones…are organized hierarchically.”40 Turchin has shown that a common feature of state growth and social hierarchy is “technical innovations associated with increasing warfare intensity” and that “the chief drivers of increasing social complexity…are agriculture and warfare.”42

Historian Walter Scheidel describes a pattern fundamental to hierarchy and economic inequality: “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality but did little if anything to bring it under control. Up to and including the Great Compression of 1914 to 1950, we are hard pressed to identify reasonably well attested and nontrivial reductions in material inequality that were not associated, one way or another, with violent shocks.”38

Scheidel continues: “increases in inequality were driven by the interaction of technological and economic development and state formation…effective leveling required violent shocks that at least temporarily curtailed and reversed the disequalizing consequences of capital investment, commercialization, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.”39

The genetic wars to control environments and resources (the envirogenome***) have resulted in thousands of years of social, cultural and technological conflict where progress all too often falls victim to self-interest canceling self-interest.

There is no future for humankind but slavery to ‘selection’s grip’ if punishing people for their DNA differences defines civilization.

The Problem of Free Will and Well-Being

The solution to the dilemma begins with learning how to remove ‘the good’ from acts of harm.

But this is not something freely done.

A large body of research indicates people do not make choices independent of their DNA differences and the environmental conditions in which those choices are made.

For example, people evoke, select into, create and modify environments that correlate with their DNA differences (genetic propensities), forming groups and coalitions that align with their genetically-shaped social preferences in a competition to influence and control how norms and institutions regulate the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power.6,7,13,14,125,43,234

At the core of human civilization, every belief or desire aimed at producing something good is influenced and in an ultimate sense bounded by the conditions and limitations of how genes and environments affect behavior and life course outcomes.6,7,13,14,125,43,234

Self does not freely control the gene-environment interplay that creates and sustains it from moment to moment.

No one freely chooses to be rich or poor, happy or unhappy.

In a social hierarchy, the norms and institutions we rely on to govern our differences are to a great extent dependent on crude pleasure/pain approaches to happiness and well-being anchored to the biology of our individual differences.

While conscious thought, calculation and reflection reveals some environmental factors involved in making choices and predicting outcomes, rules of punishment based on free will or one’s duty to a conception of what is right are nonetheless shaped by the biology of our psychological individual differences.

Envirogenomic Well-Being

This is where envirogenomics comes into the picture.

The first step is to use AI to penetrate the complexity of the envirogenome in order to remove the illusion ‘self is good’ when it harms other to satiate its desire for consumption and resource dominance.

Every person has a positive envirogenome where their life course well-being is not dependent on or the result of quality life resources and years extracted from others.

While each person’s psychological individuality is rooted in DNA differences (genetic propensities) that do not change over one’s life course, it is the interaction of these differences and ever-changing environmental conditions that shapes life course trajectories and well-being.

Envirogenomics encompasses all environmental factors and conditions that interact with a person’s DNA, resulting in the complex psychological traits and behaviors that make each person’s sense of self and well-being unique.

Envirogenomics is the key to penetrating the problem of ‘good harms.’

It opens the possibilities of democracy based on individual well-being.

The ability to unravel the social effects of the envirogenome allows democracy to evolve into a new form of social cooperation: Well-Being Across DNA Differences.

A fundamental goal for AI is to provide alternatives to an action that would allow individual differences concerning happiness to not descend into predatory conflicts.

AI is the means to remove harms that function as social and moral goods (punishment) as the crude and primitive default condition of social control and deservingness.

AI can free us from justifications of the good by taking the good out of the harms we employ to accomplish a goal or a feeling of happiness and well-being.

Predatory altruism is another example—where actions beneficial to a group that harm both self and other are good.

AI can clear a path down which every person can travel to reach a sustainable quality life–the freedom to pursue a healthy, happy, long and purposeful life without ‘good harms’ leading the way.

However...

Are we nothing more than group versus group ‘prosocial predators’ caught in selection’s grip trying to build a benevolent AI?

AI is a low cost, highly effective means of creating and reinforcing the ‘socio-genetic’ structure of social hierarchy.

AI will predict with growing accuracy, as information is acquired on an individual basis through the Internet, how environments can be manipulated on a person-by-person basis.

AI will place hierarchy elites in a singular position to manipulate and control political and economic policies.

Will such power give governments and corporations the ability to turn human beings into digital proxies in service to their AI masters and a new form of social hierarchy?

What will hierarchy-elites, who own and control the AI systems now appearing across the Internet—the oligarchs, plutocrats and other sociopolitical supercrats and demagogues, do for you?

By the end of the 21st century will there be billions of people trapped in the socioeconomic bowels of AI algorithms?

In a social hierarchy, the concept of efficiency is burdened by inefficient costs related to political institutions and technological innovations whose primary purpose is the extraction of resources, income and wealth from targeted individuals, groups and societies, resulting in a pattern of inequality, social dominance, socioeconomic conflict, war and now climate change.

Perhaps, within another generation or two, exhausted by our individual differences with nowhere else to go, the four interacting forces of evolution having reached their zenith and their nadir at the same point in time, we disappear into our machines…?

There is only one way out of the Jungle…

Self has no moral space separate from the well-being of Other

Written by WGW

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