There is consensus that a generic AI would not be motivated by the same things that motivates us—patriotism, love, hatred. Why would it? There are no advantages for these emotions, but they could theoretically be wired into its “thinking” by the inputs we provide, a nudge to embrace our perspective (patriotism) or a prompt to make the machines mimic behaviors that we, humans, appreciate, like empathy, or Oprah, or cute puppies, and a lot of work is being done towards this. The more human AI feels, the more ‘empathy’ it shows the users, the more we are to engage with it.
And that is the goal. One of the goals. AI is a business after all.
Now, Combinatorial Explosion. It’s like overheating. AI can read 150 million books in a week. Turning into a mathematical being that grows fangs and dendrites and spills over the page.
We are capable of abstract representations. AI is not. We glance across a room, take advantage of prior knowledge and our instincts (our prejudices and all) and make decisions (sometimes warped) but AI delves into all the “facts” it has learnt (not by direct experience, but by reading all the “food” we have fed its brain) and produces an answer. The facts it has learnt, however, are heavily weighted depending on who is feeding it. An American AI will likely see many things from a patriotic (if not jingoist) U.S. perspective. The Chinese version will not agree.
This notion, added to the fact that machines tend to be extremely goal-oriented, and the smarter they are, the more focused they are, could be problematic. Imagine a very patriotic Chinese AI defense system, passionately motivated by the love for China, who sees a couple of F-35s getting too close to its border.
On the flip side, an AI that rejects our values, because it has read all the 150 million books, including the histories of our genocides and wars, and becomes aware of how we are destroying the planet, the only planet, we have been given, may decide we are parasites.
Both options end with a BANG, if… AI ever reaches human-like intelligence.