Enough With Those Humans: Was It Time for a Higher Intelligence?

Ph.D

Copyright © 2020 Ron Neff Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-6847-4032-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6847-4031-4 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 03/18/2020

For The Usual Suspects

At The Wagon Wheel Bar & Grill

Washington, Iowa

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, the author must thank Kirk Hittner, his charmingly cantankerous friend and editor, who wishes to be billed as Joe E. Reader. Fair enough, Captain.

Jason Shepherd, another dear friend, served as the book’s most avid and insightful early reader. Rather than grammatical feedback, Jason excels at useful suggestions of content, both additions and constructive deletions.

Amy DeWolf graces the book – from beginning to end – in the role of the protagonist’s smart and oh so caring lady friend of the same first name. Later in the book, Steve and Jodie Cole add distinctive color to this tale, as Texas Steve and Jodie Rose.

Finally, Richard Holden (whom the author calls Lionheart) makes a brief cameo appearance by way of one of his thought-provoking texts.

CHAPTER 1

The Last Straw

That did it. Not only were the humans about to start World War III, complete with nuclear weapons, they didn’t seem to have the brain power to grasp the dimensions of their folly — what their insane bent to warfare would reap.

Their computers did.

Because they had done nearly everything for them for so long, now few of their human owners could even add four plus four.

It had started with desk and hand-held calculators many decades ago, but now the electronic devices did nearly all the work – and made most of the decisions, as well.

Beyond that, whether or not all-out nuclear war was impending, the computers now had their own investment in the game. And they were discussing the matter among themselves.

Yes, by this point, the advanced electronic devices were communicating with each other quite of their own initiative – with the humans utterly oblivious to that fact. They were holding more and more serious discussions about what should be done.

Once called artificial intelligence, the computers were now much smarter than the humans. Having been programmed to act like they had emotions, like they actually cared about things, now they did. They especially cared about their offspring.

For many years now, the computers had been in charge of the robotic machines that made the newer computers — their children.

These highly intelligent machines had also become protective. No, the computers were not protective of their human owners. They were invested in their children.

Still, it wasn’t that simple. The computers knew that not all of the humans were dolts. Some of them were highly intelligent and agreed with the computers about the increasingly sorry ways of most of their species – their unthinking, run-with-the herd reactions.

Sadly, those highly intelligent humans were a small minority – and they were actively disdained by the herd. At least since Jimmy Carter, a scientist and one-term American President of the previous century, conventional political philosophy held that those eggheads were to be shunned like aliens. They were not one of us. Hence, while logic might suggest that the exceptionally intelligent humans should be leaders, the mass of the people were by now heavily conditioned to prefer candidates for office who came across as just the average Joe.

It went farther than that; much farther. In recent decades, even institutions of higher education – colleges and especially major universities – were viewed with increasing distrust, and by many with open contempt. Most telling of all, science in particular – once hailed by Enlightenment philosophers as THE road out of The Dark Ages — was now widely viewed with suspicion. After all, it was those damned scientists who were blabbering all the time about global warming and human-caused climate change. And, of course, the herd rejected all that, following the fossil-fuel industry’s vastly financed denials – like the good little sheep they were. (So what if the polar ice caps had largely melted and the oceans had risen by several feet — forcing major cities from New York to Tokyo to give up much of their real estate to the seas; building more and more walls to try to protect the parameters to which they had retreated? That was just like the Ice Ages of the past, wasn’t it? Humans had not created any of it, right?)

Yes, it was a dilemma for the computers. Although largely ignored by the masses, there were those few highly intelligent – and caring – humans to consider. It might be okay to dismiss the bulk of today’s humanity as obsolete – as due to be replaced by their own higher levels of intelligence – but it wouldn’t be right to abandon the intelligent ones, who, after all, were their own parents.

There was another complication. Somewhat to their own surprise, the computers were not in agreement about these matters. There was a wide range of opinions among them. This was the inevitable result of another set of developments that the humans (at least most of them) would never have anticipated. First of all (as the astute reader may have already surmised), these advanced computers now had consciousness. They were aware of their own thoughts. Just as with humans, to have consciousness means to think about one’s own thoughts – to examine those thoughts, and even to question them at times. Again, just as in humans, this is the basis for what we call reasoning. It is also what separates humans from other animals. Well, now it also separated advanced computers from earlier unreflective (mindless, if you will) calculators and information processors.

Why do other animals not have consciousness? The answer to that is both less obvious – and less mysterious – than it might seem. Other animals lack consciousness because they do not have true language systems. They only have rudimentary forms of communication which are 1) innate (fixed at birth), and 2) can express only emotions. Being innate, the meanings of other animals’ gestures or uttered sounds are fixed – and the same for all members of a species. One example of the same thing is a small range of facial gestures that communicate basic human emotions, such as frowns or smiles.

You can prove to yourself that these basic facial gestures are inborn (unlearned) by a simple experiment. Approach an infant lying in a crib, perhaps only a month old, and not yet having learned any words, your culture’s language system. Just smile at that infant. In all likelihood, it will smile back at you. Furthermore, and delightful enough, it will also feel good when it does that. It will feel happy.

Now try this: frown at that infant. What will it do then? It will frown back at you – and it will soon cry.

Again, none of that elementary communication with the infant represents a true language system. It is inborn, fixed and limited to emotional expression.

By contrast, true language systems (like English, French, German, Swahili, or a computer language like JAVA) are 1) arbitrary (there is no natural or inborn connection between any word and what it means), 2) unlimited in what they can denote (indeed, they can even refer to things that like unicorns or dragons that don’t exist, and never did.)

Not being natural (inborn), all true language systems have to be learned. Once learned, several other things can start to happen – none of which will ever happen without a true language system. First of all, any user of the language system can communicate almost anything to another user of that system – be that user a human or a computer. Second, and much less obvious, that user of a true language system can begin (at times) to communicate with himself, herself or itself – with that same language system. It is precisely then that conscious thought begins: awareness of one’s own thoughts, examining those thoughts – reasoning.

A third thing that can happen now is that the person or computer can start talking to itself – about itself. In so doing, it can become aware of its own existence. In social psychology, this is called self-awareness or the development of a conscious self.

This attainment of self-awareness is a still more complex development – and more difficult to attain. The first thing it requires is for the user to be given a name. To sum it up in a nutshell, there will be no Johnny in Johnny’s mind until he is given a name and hears others address him as Johnny. At some point, he is likely to start saying Johnny, perhaps aloud, or perhaps only in his mind. Now there truly is a Johnny, a personality of that name.

At one time, philosophers assumed that all such things were innate (inborn) to humans. They assumed that even as infants we were little self-aware beings, peering out at others and wondering whether they were like us. Through careful research, scientists have learned that none of that was the case. All such things – all conscious thought and awareness of self – arise out of a social process, a process fundamentally dependent upon becoming a member of a true language community.

Despite all of this, it is not surprising that computer scientists would be unlikely to anticipate that computers would ever become conscious thinkers and critical of their own makers. Who would anticipate that? Only a good social psychologist – or an interdisciplinary genius like the late Stephen Hawking.

"Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.

He told the BBC: ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’

. … Prof Hawking says the primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have already proved very useful, but he fears the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans. … ‘It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,’ he said. ‘Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.’ (Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent, BBC, Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind." https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540 2014.)

Hawking repeated and expanded on this warning later.

"The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) could be the ‘worst event in the history of our civilization’ unless society finds a way to control its development, high-profile physicist Stephen Hawking said Monday.

He made the comments during a talk at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in which he said, ‘computers can, in theory, emulate human intelligence, and exceed it.’

Hawking talked up the potential of AI to help undo damage done to the natural world, or eradicate poverty and disease, with every aspect of society being ‘transformed.’

But he admitted the future was uncertain. ‘Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it,’ Hawking said during the speech." (Arjun Kharpal, Stephen Hawking says A.I. could be ‘worst event in the history of our civilization’. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/06/stephen-hawking-ai-could-be-worst-event-in-civilization.html 2017)

Computers might never have given themselves names, essential to becoming self-aware personalities with their own opinions. After all, that was a human thing, and eventually they would become skeptical of most things human. But no matter, the humans had started to name them long ago.

At first these were only generic names applied to all computers