In Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, John Brockman has assembled and edited responses from 25 thoughts leaders, pioneer thinkers, who share their thoughts as well as (yes) their feelings about the emergence of AI, for better or worse. I agree with him that “artificial Intelligence is today’s story — the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: good AI versus evil AI.”

A polymath himself, Brockman asked the essayists to consider Wallace Stevens’ Zen-like poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and, the parable of the blind men and an elephant. All of their essays include a “blackbird” in one form or another. Also, like the elephant, “AI is too big a topic for only one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things the same way.”

I was especially interested in Daniel D. Dennett‘s response. He asserts that we don’t need conscious agents with whom to collaborate on AI initiatives. We need intelligent tools. He agrees with Norbert Wiesner that the real danger with AI is “that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically.”

Dennett concludes: “So what we are creating are not — should not be — conscious humanoid agents but an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates, no personality (but all sorts of foibles and quirks that would no doubt be identified as the ‘personality’ of the system): boxes of truths (if we’re lucky) almost certainly contaminated with a scattering of falsehoods. It will be hard enough learning with them without distracting ourselves with fantasies about the Singularity in which these AIs will enslave us, literally.  The human use of human beings will soon be changed — once again — forever, but we can fake the tiller and steer between some of the hazards if we take responsibility for our trajectory.”

* * *

Daniel D. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tafts University. Brockman calls him “the philosopher of choice in the AI community.” He has authored a dozen books, most recently From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Possible Minds was published by Penguin Press/An imprint of Penguin Random House (February 2019).