Of maternal robots and World War lll leaks
absurdities + incompetencies that would be comical if they weren't so...
Here you go. Another scraping of the news detritus from the past few days that I think will spark some nuanced and compassionate discussion.
For anyone new here, sometimes I do this - I plant bits of news, listens, ideas etc that build on themes we’ve been discussing as a group here for a while that I feel encourage more robust reflection by virtue of their complexity or paradigm-defying nature. Today’s collection is, to be transparent, stuff I don’t quite know what to make, nor what it all points to. Help me out?
What if we programmed maternal instincts into the robots?
Former Google executive, Noble Prize-winning scientist and “Godfather of AI”Geoffrey Hinton is a vocal AI doomist. He’s just come out and said we don’t stand a chance stopping AI from becoming more powerful than us; the horse has bolted. He also says we won’t be able to get it to submit to us when it does in fact become all-powerful.
But!
He offers one last route available to us: Building “maternal instincts” into AI models, so “they really care about people” even once the technology becomes more powerful than us. He points to the way mothers care for babies and says:
“The only model we have of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing… is a mother being controlled by her baby.”
He says to program compassion and caring instincts into AI is the “only good outcome” now.
“If it’s not going to parent me, it’s going to replace me. These super-intelligent caring AI mothers, most of them won’t want to get rid of the maternal instinct because they don’t want us to die.”
How ironic would it be if the Tech Bros suddenly, in an effort to save themselves, artificially insert the qualities they’ve tried to eradicate from culture into their products. And how (horribly) ironic, too, if they congratulate themselves for “discovering” such a solution?
Before I could get too excited by such a tidy solution to our woes, however, I read that China has announced it’s building a “robot wife” that can bear children. Many news reports have run with headlines to the effect of “Women no longer needed” and the comments sections have turned ugly.
You want your kids to put down their phones…?
A large, recently published survey of kids conducted by a bunch of social researchers including Jonathan Haidt has pointed out a bleeding obvious insanity that I had to smile at. Parents (all of us) tend to argue that kids are on their phones the technology is addictive. But it turns out the truth is more… nuanced. The report found:
Digital technology has given kids access to (often dangerous) virtual worlds in which they’re allowed to roam far more freely than in the real one. The authors of the report highlight that more than a quarter of 8-9 year olds aren’t allowed to play unsupervised in their own front yard, for instance.
But the kids in the surveys said what they longed for was more freedoms in the real world. The results showed they don’t want screens, they don’t want supervision, they want bog-standard hangs with friends.
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But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialise in the real world on their own, and tie them up to the point of anxiety-addled exhaustion in organised activities1, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.