#311: A.I. and Civic Responsibility

Let’s talk about artificial intelligence, democracy, and guns. How does this go together? Let’s find out.

We are living in a time where artificial intelligence is becoming more and more normal. I’ve been using it more. You’ve probably been using it more. If you haven’t, you may be using it without knowing. It’s going to be all around us whether we like it or not.

Unless somebody does something drastic, this is out of the box. We can’t rein it in anymore.

Why can’t we rein it in? Because it’s a global competition, and if our country decides to stop it, another country will continue it. This is how evolution works. This is how technological evolution works. This is how it is.

What Democracy Means

Democracy is based on the idea that the citizen is the true sovereign of a country. This principle is also called popular sovereignty.

What does this mean? If we think it through, if we are sovereign, which means that we actually as a group have true power over the state, either through elections or by tolerating a dictator. Because make no mistake, dictators can only function if the people let them.

Whether you call them monarchies or whatever, doesn’t matter. If the people decide they can’t take it any longer, even the dictatorship is over.

This insight leads us down a certain path. The insight that citizens are sovereign is the outcome of the observation of political processes throughout history. It is not an ideology. It is an observation. This is part of political science that actually is science.

As a consequence, and this is what many thinkers in the Enlightenment discovered, our rights that we have are not given to us by the state because the state is not sovereign. They’re given to us by nature or by God or by whatever authority made us humans and imbued us with these rights. We have these rights by nature.

We are by nature free. We by nature should have freedom of speech, freedom of all kinds of things including property.

The Democratic Compromise

This is where it gets tricky. Who’s going to take that freedom away from us? We could say we create a system in which everybody decides there’s a compromise. This compromise is called taxes and fees and whatever. So we pay taxes because we as a society have decided that it is beneficial to all of us citizens to have something in the middle that negotiates conflicts, that sets up structures, that sets up infrastructure, that creates a society based on rule of law, order, and whatever because it’s just too difficult to have direct democracy at scale.

It didn’t even work in Athens, which had more direct democracy. It worked for a while, but not in the long run. Neither in Rome. Rome had a little bit more of a balanced system, but they were democratic in the Roman Republic to a certain degree. But from all those mistakes, we have figured out that we need a form of representative government.

And this representative government has to separate powers that can compete with each other through checks and balances. But we typically have in current modern democracies a body that represents the will of the people, the legislative, parliament, congress, whatever. A body that represents those that we elect into power that then actually do things, the executive. And a power that oversees whether anybody steps over what they’re supposed to do, the overwatch over laws, the jurisdiction or judiciary.

Some states even have federalism because there are coalitions of states that banded together. But the principle, even though it seems now diluted, is still true. We as citizens are sovereign.

The Second Amendment and Citizen Sovereignty

This is why to many people’s frustration or annoyance, the United States as the oldest modern democracy has something like the Second Amendment, which is based on the idea that if the citizens are sovereign, they themselves should be the backstop to any tyranny. An armed citizenry is seen as the best defense against a dictatorship.

Now, you could argue that when that was enacted and written down in the constitution as an amendment, we lived in a time of muskets. The damage that could be done was still damage, but it was not a long gun or repeating rifle or anything.

Nevertheless, the principle itself seems sensible. You could question how much power citizens should be allowed to have. Should an individual citizen or even a militia of individual citizens be able to match the power of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force?

That’s where it becomes tricky. I don’t think anybody believes that, or some people do but not the most ardent defenders of the Second Amendment, that we should have nuclear weapons at home.

However, we are heading in a direction where we have almost the equivalent, and this is where AI comes in.

AI: The New Weapon

The Second Amendment is a logical outcome out of the thinking that citizens are sovereign. We should be able to resist tyranny.

But there are these side effects. The more weapons we have, the more likely it is that confrontations between citizens escalate. If you have citizens that have a quarrel with each other and there are no guns, there’s still ways to do damage, but any of them having guns may escalate the situation.

We’ve also seen how people who are less stable have used guns to kill. And we see this all the time. I mean, people are finding ways to kill each other when they’re frustrated or when they have some kind of trouble with society or when they just have trouble within themselves.

You could say the counterargument to the Second Amendment is that we are all just not intelligent enough, that there needs to be some kind of guardrails that if we believe in it, we should at least limit it.

Alas, the question of should we have nukes? No, I don’t believe we should, but we are all now having AI.

We saw the question come up originally when the World Wide Web became available to everybody. Now, anyone with a little bit of knowledge can find online instructions about how to build the worst kinds of weapons. We can teach ourselves all kinds of things.

AI makes all this look like child’s play.

What Do We Do?

So what do we do? I have no real answer but I have maybe some steps that we have to take.

We could think of like Isaac Asimov thought things like laws of robotics where we limit what AI can do. But again in a global competition, I’m skeptical that we can enforce that.

One thing AI does very well already or relatively well is translation. Not completely well but good enough. So much so that you’ve seen people less willing to study foreign languages because if you can just travel and you have your phone and that phone has the equivalent of a universal translator in it, which is a fantastic thing, but then why should you learn languages?

If you can look anything up, why should you learn anything?

And that is where the problem really becomes much worse.

The Knowledge Problem

AI in the end will be so powerful, so knowledgeable that it will have all the knowledge of all of humanity. We probably can never match that, not in every detail. But if we go down this path as we are going down already with foreign language learning of thinking that we can outsource information, knowledge to the internet or to AI, then we are in trouble.

We are already seeing how search engines are transforming how they’re displaying content and how users are changing how they are searching for things.

Before AI, internet search was like being a detective. You had to look through several sites, compare information, find out what’s believable, what not, and then make a value judgment based on what you already know.

Now, we are being nudged in the direction of, well, AI will do that for you and we’ll already give you the best answer.

But AI uses something that has been called not in the context of AI but can be transferred to that: instrumental logic. It gives you a kind of knowledge that is useful. It does not give you the kind of knowledge that necessarily is reflective.

This is the difference between the kind of thinking that we have to do as humans still and the kind of thinking that AI can do for us.

The Need for Human Judgment

Someone has to say all this information is nice and well, but we need to evaluate it. We need to think about what to do with it. We need to think about what ethical choices follow this and we need to sometimes delay decisions. Think about what not to do or how to do things differently or maybe how to abandon a project that we all wanted to do.

For that though, we do need knowledge. We cannot make decisions very well in an information-sparse environment. If we don’t know anything, how are we going to evaluate the knowledge given to us by others?

And this is where it becomes tricky. Democracy relies on citizens not just conceptually being sovereign but practically. We have the power but we have responsibility, and in order to exercise our power we have to be very judicious in what we do.

This is where knowledge comes in. This is where education comes in. As I have said in the previous video, the answer to AI is more education, more ethics, more citizen responsibility, more reflectivity.

If we start outsourcing our thinking, our reflection, our knowledge, this is where we’ll go down the wrong path.

The Ultimate Challenge

So what does this mean? Do we now find ways to limit democracy? Do we outsource our decisions to AI?

Every one of us will have the tools available to destroy the planet. Just think about this. The power of the technology that we are developing right now and that we are about to develop gives all of us a kind of power that elevates us beyond any human being before.

If you are frightened by that thought, then I have achieved my goal here.

If you say, “I can handle it,” okay. But can you think of people around you that maybe can’t handle that?

What do you do with this idea that unstable people or evil people have the same power as stable or good people? Whatever good or evil means, we are sometimes all pushed into situations where the decisions we are making will be much less interested in the general good but more in our own survival. So we can all be put into situations where our sense of responsibility for the general welfare of all is challenged.

The Solution: Education and Human Excellence

I have no solution. One solution I have maybe is education is that we just as AI gets better, we have to get better too. Just as AI gets more powerful, we have to be matching this power with the power of our brains, with our ethics.

We can’t just outsource what we do. And there is no way. If we want to preserve any sense of democracy, any sense of freedoms, any sense of rights, there’s no way we can outsource this to a well-meaning AI in the future.

This game has been played in the past. This idea of the good king, yeah, that works for a while till the king is replaced by a worse person.

If you think that a well-meaning, well-trained AI is going to be beneficial in the long term, then I think we’ll be in for a rude awakening.

If we want to preserve citizen power, if we want to preserve our rights, we can’t just give up on being human, fully human.