Imagine

BY DR. AGONSON

Imagine, then—I want to say something a little more complex than I think I can—a gear being driven by an engine. Alright? Well, your question seems to me like asking, “What will we do with the driver if the gear flies off?” We together are seeing the gear wobble, and at such great speeds, we might both be very worried about the course it may take if it would come free. It might fly into the wall, or into us, or, under certain extreme conditions, fly off into space and drift away forever, at least, forever as best we understand it. The thing is, it will go a little ways without the driving of the engine before entropy gets it on earth. Or, it will fly off and leave the story.

That’s what I mean: the technology exits the story. You ask what will be done to the human race if technology outpaces it, and I answer that man will do to man the inhuman things it has always done, only, by your progressive philosophy, you will torture man to keep him in pace with a broken machine.

If a man is not made for a bicycle, it is because, strange as it sounds, the bicycle is made for the man. If we are given a bicycle, and it is the best and latest bicycle, made by very clever engineers, we may laugh at those engineers and spurn the bicycle if it does not fit the working of a man’s legs. We will not cut up the man’s legs to make it fit the bicycle, though many an academic would rather call in a butcher than give up his ideal bicycle.

If A.I. outstrips humanity, then it will outstrip humanity, and thereby lose its drive just like our gear flying off its engine. It may do terrible harm, it may ricochet and do that harm to the engine, but it will not drive itself. We will not put the A.I. on trial, though we may put the engineers, the mechanics, the workers, or whatever persons were responsible in the dock and demand they answer for whatever damage their machine did.

Yet still, you might ask, “What will we do with man when his own creations have no use for him?” We? We, being man? Are we not men? What will our creations do to us? They might kill us, which is to say, man makes a weapon that kills a man. If they become complicated enough to remake us into something better suited to them, then man will have marred man.

A tailor, having sewn an ill-fitted suit, will be arrested, despite his pleas and cries of the beauty and stunning progress of his work, if he tries to cut and resow the flesh instead of the fabric. Shall the creator worship his creation? Shall he bow down to his computer and beg to be remade in its silicone image? Perhaps. It would be a sad story, though comic. But I think I will draw a line when he tries to remake me to better suit his computer even when he says the computer makes him do it.