The Real Problem With AI: Us

On March 12, 2024, both the CNN and Fox News websites featured nearly identical reports warning that artificial intelligence (AI) poses a non-trivial threat to human existence, and that there is a 5-10 percent chance that the human species will be extinguished if AI development continues at its current—and accelerating—pace.

As someone who came of age in the 1980s, I am very familiar with science fiction and action movies in which AI is cast as the villain, like War Games, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Terminator franchise. In all of these scenarios, AI is created to help humans but winds up turning on us and trying to wipe us out of existence. Indeed, the AI-as-villain theme has been all too common in films: witness the recent horror movie M3GAN, in which an AI doll becomes murderous once it gains the powers of self-awareness and self-protection.

But why are stories about AI always so ominous? Why are there so few stories about benevolent forms of AI that protect and guide us? My answer omes from Neale Donald Walsch's (1994) book Conversations with God. There are two memorable lines from this book I will paraphrase here:

• When a civilization's technological evolution exceeds its spiritual evolution, it destroys itself.
• You cannot imagine creating something that is greater than you are.

These points are essentially the theme of my argument: The problem is not AI; the problem is us.

Humans like to characterize ourselves as an advanced species, particularly in our religious scriptures. But is this idea accurate? Consider the following points, and whether a truly advanced species would do any of these things:

• Attack, plunder, and kill our own kind
• Destroy our own habitat
• Kill other living creatures for sport, or because they are in our way
• Put poisonous substances into our bodies and wonder why we get sick
• Blame others for our own actions and shortcomings
• Maintain a very limited understanding of life and of death.

Is it a stretch to expect that a truly advanced species would know what death means and what happens afterward, would be able to agree on whether or not there is a Creative Force (God, the Great Spirit, et cetera) that started the universe (as well as what that Creative Force wants from us), and would be able to control the weather on its planet? Wouldn't members of a truly advanced species be able to choose the date and manner of their departure from their world? Wouldn't a truly advanced species be able to rely on persuasion and cooperation instead of invading, bombing, and bullying each other into submission?

What I am saying is that humans are not there yet; we're not even close. Our species is less than 100,000 years old, and our earliest civilizations began less than 10,000 years ago—an infinitesimally small amount of time when compared to the 5-6-billion-year age of the universe. We are an evolving species, and have not been around all that long. We are too young to be considered an advanced species.

Simply stated, we are not advanced enough to be able to manage technologies like AI. To paraphrase Walsch, our spiritual evolution is nowhere near what it would need to be for us to manage such advanced technologies without destroying ourselves in the process.

At its essence, AI is a human creation. Humans write the code that gives it life. Because we are selfish, primitive, and violent creatures—especially when groups of humans interact with other groups of humans—how can we expect to create an AI that is more advanced and evolved than we are? As long as human societies are competing to create the most advanced forms of AI, the AI we create will mirror our own spiritual evolution (or lack thereof). It will be competitive, selfish, and violent, just as our species is. As Walsch has stated, we cannot imagine creating something that is greater than we are.

And therein lies the problem.

We are not ready for AI, and my sincere hope is that we hit the pause button until we are. We need to work on our spiritual advancement before we take on something like this, or the results could be devastating.