It’s time to rethink the metaphor of AIs as monsters out to eradicate or colonize us.
Artificial Intelligence is the subject of at least as much human fear and greed as it is of hope and altruism. Some of the dominant metaphors for where AI can go horribly wrong come from science fiction: the Skynet of the Terminator movies where machines want to wipe out humanity, or the superintelligences of the Matrix movies that (spoiler alert) want to use us as living batteries for their continued existence. In such stories, AIs have interests that do not coincide with ours, and because they are smarter than we humans are, we’re screwed.
These are alien invasion stories, except instead of the aliens looking like giant bipedal lobsters (Predator, Independence Day), they are algorithms (sometimes embodied in robots).
But AIs aren’t inherently monsters: they are beings that can do some things better and faster than we humans can. You just have to be careful what you ask for, like in Nick Bostrom’s famous “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment where somebody asks an AI to make as many paperclips as possible, whereupon the AI turns the entire world into paperclips and then looks to the stars.
Instead of monsters, we should treat AIs like genies.
Genies are powerful, magical beings that can do things we can’t, but genies are also confined in ways that we aren’t—to lamps and rings. Likewise, AIs are confined to hardware and software in ways that we aren’t.
A lot of genie stories, from jokes about hard-of-hearing genies (“do you really think I asked for a 10 inch pianist?”), to the endgame of Disney’s Aladdin, to many of the stories in Richard Francis Burton’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, have the same point: you have to be careful with your wishes because a genie’s job isn’t to ask refining or “do you really mean?” questions. The genie just wants to grant your wishes and move on with its life, hoping that maybe it can escape the lamp or ring along the way.
Genie stories, in other words, are about successful and unsuccessful prompt engineering.
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* Image Prompt: “Create a photorealistic, 6w x 4h image of a classic genie story, but instead of a genie coming out of a metal lamp it’s the human-approximating face of an artificial intelligence. The genie coming out of the lamp is at the center of the image. Around it are surprised humans, one rubbing the lamp with a polishing rag.”
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