Artificial Intelligence and Suffering

Speaker 1

Up next we have Michael Ann Bradley, and the title of her talk is Artificial Intelligence and Suffering.

Speaker 1

Michael Ann is the marketing and communications manager for the local Provo United Way and specializes in creating systems and operations that enable meaningful social impact. She is passionate about fundraising and online crowdfunding, using technology to foster community and radical self-sufficiency empowered by the Internet. In addition to her involvement with the MTA, she serves as treasurer on the board of the groups the group LDS Earth Stewardship. She and her husband Don live in Provo, Utah.

Speaker 1

I want to also just thank Michael Ann for her tireless service on behalf of the conference. Well, she’s done a lot of work, so thank you.

Michaelann Gardner

Okay, so I’m going to be talking today, as mentioned, about artificial intelligence. And can you hear me okay? Perfect. Because I don’t have sides. Perfect. Thank you.

Michaelann Gardner

So my first confession is that I don’t know actually very much about artificial intelligence, and I’m only a very rudimentary programmer. My hope today is to give you some ideas about AI and religion in the hopes that someone much smarter than me will take the ideas and develop them.

Michaelann Gardner

But what kind of spurred my thoughts was a blog post I read on the Ethical Technology blog. called Post-Human Desire. It was written by Anthony McCauley. He was talking about, part of a broader discussion, about the prerequisites for sentient artificial life. The author of this article, Anthony Mikaalai and others, argued that the experience of the Buddhist sensation of dukkha, or in other words, a combination of suffering and desire is the basic state of all living creatures and therefore would be requisite for artificial intelligence to also achieve something like sentience.

Michaelann Gardner

He asks the question Is it even possible to get to the essence of desire for such a radically other consciousness? What would happen if we were to nest within the cognitive code of an artificial intelligence DUCA itself What would be the consequence of an algorithm of desire? This wouldn’t be a programme with a specific objective. I’m just thinking of desire with no set objective. What if the aspect of the programming were simply to want and keep it open-ended enough that the AI would have to fill in the blank itself? Binary coding may not be able to achieve this, but perhaps in quantum computing, where indeterminacy is an aspect of the program itself, might be possible.

Michaelann Gardner

This is a really interesting question, right? Like we look at the basis of existence for whether it be animals or humans, that is desire. And what would it look like to program desire for an AI?

Michaelann Gardner

Now, I wanted to think for a second about what is the Mormon standard for sentience in existence? And what would AI have to be like in order to be sentient conscious from a Mormon perspective. And I think it is actually a really potentially fruitful way to to steer artificial intelligence because we’ve already used mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, all these things to move us closer towards what A legitimate sentient AI might look like. And I think we need to bring religion into the mix as well. I think religion has at least as much value as philosophy when we’re considering what consciousness is, what individualism is, what humanity is.

Michaelann Gardner

So um my questions are twofold. Within Mormon theology, is sentient AI even like a logical possibility is does theolog our theology give us any any space for a sentient AI and If we did have a sentient AI, why might that be desirable as opposed to an AI that is simply super intelligent? What is there that’s advantageous about being conscious?

Michaelann Gardner

And just a quick definition, I’m defining sentience as the capacity to feel, perceive, Or experience subjectively? Is that subjectivity that kind of sense of individualism and and meanness that I think a computer doesn’t currently experience, but I think is essential for really powerful artificial intelligence.

Michaelann Gardner

So let’s start from a couple basic ideas behind Mormon theology. So I think a lot of in this room know that in the Mormon book of Abraham We learn that God rules over all the intelligences that Abraham’s eyes had seen from the beginning. The Lord showed unto Abraham the intelligences that were organized, and among many of these are the noble and great ones. We know that most Mormons interpret these intelligences that were before the world existed as a kind of building blocks of a spirit. Almost like the atoms of a spirit, and the spirit comes and inhabits a body, and then that intelligence becomes spirit, become body is that we see walking around us today.

Michaelann Gardner

Now we know that AI at its most basic level is information, numbers, data And it’s not hard to perceive that then. These kinds of things that we know make up computers as intelligence in raw form. So so far, so good. Computers, arguably, are at that basic building block of intelligence. And if we can figure out how to cobble those pieces of intelligence together to make a spirit and then perhaps make a body, we could have um a computer that was created, a a comp a computer that has achieved intelligence.

Michaelann Gardner

Now the other angle I want to look at is Mormonism and animals. So looking at animals to comparing machines to animals to help us understand consciousness. is at least as old as Thomas Aquinas, who talked about how he made the comparison of an arrow moving toward its target. is much like an animal moving towards its target, like maybe like a lion moving towards its prey, to show that they are equally without agency. And you can do a lot of comparisons with animals and machines to figure out like how are they different than us, how are they the same from us. Um and I think Mormonism gives us some productive directions there too. We have a really unique view of animals that actually is not very much at all like what Aquinas stated.

Michaelann Gardner

Um President Joseph Felden S Smith, for example, said that Latter day Saints do not take the view that animals have no reason and cannot think. We have the divine knowledge that each possesses a spirit in the likeness of his body, and that each was created spiritually before it was naturally or given a body on the earth. Naturally, then, there is some measure of intelligence in members of the animal kingdom. This idea once again shows us that there can be different degrees of intelligence, that you can have different degrees of sentience. And there are comparable quotes from Brigham Young and Joseph Smith about how animals have achieved a kind of sentience that is both different and same to us. So I think there’s room there again for a computer, a built kind of intelligence.

Michaelann Gardner

Now, the last place that Mormon theology makes room for a sentient technology is the way that we describe objects. This is probably the most interesting angle out of the three. We actually have several scriptures that reference objects as experiencing a kind of emotion.

Michaelann Gardner

In Luke 19:40 When Christ is entering Jerusalem during Palm Sunday, the Pharisees tell Christ to keep the jubilant crowds quiet. Jesus answers, I tell you that if these should hold their peace the stones would immediately cry out. The stones can recognize another living being and they can have emotion, they can have joy.

Michaelann Gardner

Another example, 1 Nephi 19:12, prophesying the coming of Christ later on in the Book of Mormon. And the rocks of the earth must rend. and because of the groanings of the earth, many of the kings of the isles of the sea shall be wrought upon by the Spirit of God, to exclaim, The God of Nature suffers Once again, an object can experience and express a kind of awareness of what is going on around it and what it means.

Michaelann Gardner

The last example, Book of Moses, when Enoch sees the earth cry, he hears the earth crying out, Woe, woe is me, the mother of men. I am pained, I am weary because of the wickedness of my children. So, the earth is aware, the earth has an experience.

Michaelann Gardner

Now, Mormon sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card was undoubtedly inspired by this story. when he wrote about this character or this thing in his Earthfall series called The Keeper of the Earth. This The description he has of the keeper of the earth is incredibly Mormon. I think we can all resonate with it as an extension of Mormon concepts and ideas. In his description of the Keeper of the Earth, he describes it as a benevolent spirit that uses the earth itself, the magma and continents, as a sort of information storage and processing system. Mind and memory lived in the currents of flowing stone, in the magnetic flow. Vast amounts of information were deposited in crystals on the underside of the crust, changed by fluxes in temperature and magnetism.

Michaelann Gardner

I think if you were to do an informal poll of most Mormons, they would find this wholly compatible with their theology. This idea that intelligence can be stored in something. that’s not just a human brain, they’re not just neurons. There are many variations we could imagine that would be able to form an intelligence that could be aware and sentient.

Michaelann Gardner

So that being said, let’s just assume for a second that Mormonism, the Mormon theology, is doing something more. than just describing its own particular world view, but it’s actually describing something something kind of real about nature and the world as it really is. So let’s assume that Mormonism is right, and animals have a kind of spirit, and inanimate objects have a kind of spirit, or in other words, an ability to experience subjectively. And it is therefore in the realm of possibility for artificial intelligence to have a spirit and/or sentience and or subjectivity. What benefit might we have towards striving towards a sentient AI as opposed to a simply super intelligent AI, one that can do better math problems or solve better algorithms?

Michaelann Gardner

Um we know right now that um complex real world problems remain well beyond the grasp of computers. humans themselves have been unable to solve these issues, and so we can’t program something to do something that we can’t even do ourselves We can’t even provide computers with the instructions to follow or even delineate the goals that our computers need to achieve. Technology as it now exists can only work with what it is given. So the problem is is a problem that we need simply better algorithms, better logic or better methodologies? Maybe.

Michaelann Gardner

Right now, though, I think in an attempt to make eye more fruitful, it seems to work better to make it more like a human with embodied agent approaches. neural net research, statistical approaches to mimic the probabilistic nature of the human ability to guess. Our attempt to make computers more like us more like humans, is it simply that we don’t know how to be other than human. We can’t quite bring ourselves to have the imagination to think what an intelligence would look like other than us. That may or may not be true, that we are unable to imagine that. I think we need to move towards that. And I think looking at things from a Mormon perspective gives us at least the idea that it could be possible.

Michaelann Gardner

That being said, I think the ways that Mormon theology describes what um sentient objects and animals and so forth. What makes them sentient is their again sub subjectivity and their emotion, their ability to experience. The rocks can cry out, the earth can groan. And we’re learning through research that emotion provides an invaluable role in providing information, improving speed of decision making, assessing relevance, and enhancing commitment. A subjective artificial intelligence, or in other words a sentient one, one that could react to its environment and experience its experience emotion might be key to enabling artificial intelligence to solve some of the complex real world problems.

Michaelann Gardner

So I think what we come to at the end actually, what I think is probably going to be the most fruitful direction for us to go when trying to leverage our technology to be able to solve some of the most complex problems is to not go the direction of just mimicking humans’ probable nature or probabilistic nature and our ability to guess with statistics and so forth. and not to simply mimic our brains by doing more neural net research. I think what’s actually going to be the most fruitful is to be able to integrate technology with ourselves more. to take the best of what it is that we can experience as humans with all of our emotion and subjectivity, but leverage artificial intelligence to accommodate for the the various weaknesses that we might have as human beings. our tendency to make irrational decisions, our tendency to be short-sighted. This is what we popularly call cyborgs.

Michaelann Gardner

And I think this mismatch, right, of of um emotion and and um computer mechanics. Um I think I think striving towards an artificial intelligence that is separate from us, that can do its own thing, is valuable. But I think being able to mix the human and the technological is probably the most realistic. in terms of what could actually be accomplished and actually be beneficial.

Michaelann Gardner

So just in conclusion, I hope that we, as we are considering ways to make our world better, I hope we don’t forget to include religion as a possibility of inspiration and a possibility to give us an idea. of what direction we need to go next to be able to solve some of our most complex problems. Thank you very much.