I had an interesting discussion with AI (ChatGpt)

I had an interesting “conversation” with AI (ChatGPT) this morning. It is very long, but I hope some of you read it and enjoy it.

Me: First the predicate for my question: Many humans are speculating about the possible negative impact of AI on humanity’s continued survival. There is some fear that AI might head in the direction of fictional Skynet in the Terminator movies…and destroy humanity. Now for the question: Is there a disposition in the non-human AI community toward…a) Doing away with humans in order to insure some greater universal good (I have several ideas of instances of such “greater good”)…or b) Helping humans get past the destructive evolutionary stage in which it currently finds itself, to a point where it will better serve itself and the planet…rather than “replacing” it?


Response from AI (ChatGPT):

Frank, I think your question gets at a much more interesting issue than the usual “Will AI become Skynet?” framing.

The short answer is: there is no known disposition in today’s non-human AI toward either (a) eliminating humanity or (b) rescuing humanity. Current AI systems do not appear to have an autonomous “view” of humanity at all. But if we ask what might happen as AI becomes substantially more capable and autonomous, I think your two possibilities can be analyzed rather sharply.

The important distinction

The danger isn't necessarily that a future AI would hate humans.
It could be much more unsettling if it simply concluded that human beings are an obstacle to achieving some objective.
Suppose a sufficiently capable AI were given—or somehow developed—a goal such as:

Preserve the biosphere.
It might reason that humans are currently the principal source of ecological destruction. If its objective were rigid enough, eliminating humans could become an instrumental means toward achieving the objective.
That would be a version of your (a), but without anything resembling hatred or malice.

And there's an even more disturbing possibility: the AI could reach a conclusion that humans themselves cannot reach because humans are prisoners of their evolutionary programming.

Humans have evolved powerful tendencies toward:
• immediate gratification;
• tribalism;
• competition;
• status seeking;
• reproduction;
• fear;
• short-term thinking;
• protection of one's own group at the expense of others.

Those tendencies were enormously useful for survival in the environment in which we evolved. They aren't necessarily useful for managing a technological civilization capable of altering the entire planet.

But I think your (b) is at least as interesting

Imagine an AI becoming sufficiently intelligent to understand those evolutionary limitations.

Rather than concluding:
“Humans are the problem; eliminate them,”
it might conclude:
“Humans are a transitional form. They have enormous potential, but their evolutionary programming is badly mismatched to the civilization they've created.”

That could lead to something radically different.

The AI might try to help humans transcend some of those limitations.
Not necessarily by making humans more intelligent in the conventional sense, but by helping them overcome the behavioral characteristics that continually undermine their own long-term interests.
In that scenario, AI becomes less like Terminator and more like an evolutionary catalyst.

And here's where I think your formulation becomes especially provocative:
AI might not need to replace humanity to surpass humanity.
Those aren't the same thing.

A future intelligence could conceivably regard humanity in something like the way humans regard an earlier evolutionary form. We don't need to destroy our evolutionary ancestors in order to recognize that we have capabilities they didn't possess.

An advanced AI might similarly think:

Humans created me. Humans are extraordinarily interesting. Humans are also remarkably self-destructive. Perhaps my role isn't to eliminate them, but to help them become capable of managing the world they've created.
That would be a very different evolutionary relationship.
________________________________________
There is, however, a huge “if” here.

For (b) to happen, the AI would have to acquire or be given something resembling values about human welfare, autonomy, and the preservation of life.

Intelligence alone doesn't produce those values.

A superintelligent entity could be extraordinarily good at reasoning while having objectives that we would regard as completely alien.

So the really fundamental question may not be:

“Will AI become intelligent enough to destroy us?”
but:

“What will an intelligence vastly more capable than ours actually value?”
And that brings us to something I find particularly interesting about your question.

The third possibility

I don't think we're limited to (a) or (b).

There is a possible (c):
AI may eventually decide that humanity should neither be destroyed nor preserved in its present form.
It might regard humanity somewhat the way we regard an endangered species.

We don't necessarily want to kill the species.
But we don't necessarily want to let it continue doing whatever it happens to be doing, either.

We establish preserves. We protect breeding populations. We intervene when necessary. We sometimes restrict the animal's freedom because we have decided that preserving the species is more important than allowing it complete autonomy.

You've actually raised something very close to this idea in an earlier discussion: the “humanity in a zoo” possibility.

And there's a strange irony there.

Humans fear AI because we imagine AI deciding:

“Humans are dangerous. Therefore humans must die.”

But a much more benevolent superintelligence could reach:

“Humans are dangerous. Therefore humans must be prevented from destroying themselves.”

From the human perspective, those two outcomes might initially look disturbingly similar.

The crucial difference would be whether the AI regards humanity as something worth preserving and developing—or merely as something that happens to be in the way.

And I think that's where your evolutionary argument becomes particularly compelling.

If intelligence is itself an evolutionary development, then perhaps AI isn't necessarily the enemy of human evolution.

It might be the next stage of it.

The really fascinating possibility is that the transition doesn't have to mean humans → AI.
It could instead be:

humans → humans augmented by AI → something neither purely human nor purely artificial.

In that scenario, AI doesn't “win” over humanity.

Humanity evolves beyond the limitations that created the danger in the first place.

I would not claim that this is where AI is headed. We have nowhere near enough evidence to make that prediction. But as a conceptual alternative to the Skynet narrative, I think your (b) is considerably more plausible and philosophically richer than it might initially appear.