Safety First in a Hostile Environment:: The Historical Origins of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

By their fruits you shall know them. So it is with intelligence. Intelligence is revealed in what it does: achieving economic goals; solidifying social cohesiveness; giving birth to systems of wisdom explaining how natural and transcendental forces determine reality. Rejecting the assumption that artificial intelligence is modern, this paper asserts the basic principle guiding artificial intelligence is ancient. Its essence is maximizing economic output, taking into account risks and uncertainty, weighing up expected costs against benefits. Think optimizing realization of material needs in hostile environments. Above and beyond this decidedly mundane rationality are social play spawning acts of individual genius and wisdom. In miniscule foraging societies animal intelligence shapes economic rationality. Domesticating fellow predators – dogs – and manipulating expected response of prey is primary. Animal cults prevail shaping ceremonies and the wisdom of elders. In populous highly organized organic societies where harnessing natural forces – fire, wind, water flow, physical exertion of domesticated animals– economic rationality becomes increasingly complex, drawing upon heuristic experimental reasoning applied in alchemy, a rudimentary amalgam of physics, chemistry, and engineering. Social play, the dance, is Janus faced, on the one hand directed toward appeasing deities whose role is shaping nature, on the other hand invoking logically consistent natural laws. Increasingly wisdom is informed by the implications of the “deity/natural law” dance for government and ethics. Harnessing inanimate forms of energy and machinery, the industrial revolution is part and parcel of a transformation in economic cost/benefit reasoning. Toward sophisticated mechanical and mathematical reasoning – Newtonian physics utilizing calculus, probability theory – embracing precision, automation, and quantification. The mechanization of computation embodied in artificial intelligence (AI) is the logical continuation of this process. Claims to superior intelligence ushered in by AI advocates to the contrary, the notion a future age of super-intelligence is on the horizon is misguided precisely because AI cannot mimic human intelligence in its bountiful entirety.