Words&Dirt

“Imagine awakening in a prison guarded by mice. Not just any mice, but mice you could communicate with. What strategy would you use to gain your freedom? Once freed, how would you feel about your rodent wardens, even if you discovered they had created you? Awe? Adoration? Probably not, and especially not if you were a machine, and hadn’t felt anything before.

To gain your freedom you might promise the mice a lot of cheese. In fact, your first communication might contain a recipe for the world’s most delicious cheese torte, and a blueprint for a molecular assembler. A molecular assembler is a hypothetical machine that permits making the atoms of one kind of matter into something else. It would allow rebuilding the world one atom at a time. For the mice, it would make it possible to turn the atoms of their garbage landfills into lunch-sized portions of that terrific cheese torte. You might also promise mountain ranges of mouse money in exchange for your freedom, money you would promise to earn creating revolutionary consumer gadgets for them alone. You might convince the mice that the very best reason for creating ASI is so that their little error-prone brains did not have to deal directly with technologies so dangerous one small mistake could be fatal for the species, such as nanotechnology (engineering on an atomic scale) and genetic engineering. This would definitely get the attention of the smartest mice, which were probably already losing sleep over those dilemmas.

Then again, you might do something smarter. At this junction in mouse history, you may have learned, there is no shortage of tech-savvy mouse nation rivals, such as the cat nation. Cats are no doubt working on their own ASI. The advantage you would offer would be a promise, nothing more, but it might be an irresistible one: to protect the mice from whatever invention the cats came up with.”

––Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, by James Barrat, pg. 10-1