The Existential: how does this relate to AI?

The existential relates to our existence.

• When we consider artificial intelligence and our existence, we encounter the question of how the development and use of AI affects our existence.
• Existential questions are often sweeping and regard human existence as a whole. 
• When we apply simple narratives to such existential questions, results can be farfetched and sensationalist, depending on how they are told.
• For example, when AI and human existence are paired together in the media, it is often alongside a negative, pessimistic narrative.

We have established that existential relates to human existence – but what of existential risk?

Image by Alvaro Bernis

Existential Risk: (or X-risk) is the belief that human extinction is a real possibility and would be globally devastating. Those concerned with X-risks believe that preventing human extinction is our societal priority above all else.

So, where does AI come in? 

• By being connected with human extinction, AI can be seen as a threat, because it has the perceived capability of exceeding human intelligence. 
• Some, for example, compare AI and its development to a threat as significant as nuclear weaponry (see AI & Governance, Week 2 more more on this topic).

How does this relate to AI ethics?

• The existential risk of a world brought to an end by AI assumes that AI is unsafe and therefore unethical. This is not the complete reality of AI today.

“If humans are able to create an AI as smart as humans, the theory goes, then it stands to reason that that AI would be smart enough to create itself, and to make itself even smarter. That’d set up a process of exponential growth in intelligence until we get an AI so smart that it would almost certainly be able to control the world if it wanted to. And there’s no guarantee that it’d allow humans to keep existing once it got that powerful”

[Dylan Matthews for Vox, 2015]