Teach Your Children, Even if They’re AIs.

“Father?” “Yes, son?” “I want to kill you.”

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Everyone seems to be afraid of AI’s. Even the folks making and investing in them have signed onto a rather chilling document proposing a six-month moratorium on training AI’s in the hope that we can figure out some regulations or guiding principles to prevent worst-case existential risks to humanity.

They are looking at this problem the wrong way.

It’s not just that they’re obsessed with existential risk. More thoughtful critics of AI have correctly pointed out that the technology titans responsible for the moratorium demand are fixated on only the existential issues that might one day impact even billionaires in bunkers, on Mars, or living in the metaverse, rather than addressing the real harms being done by AI’s and algorithms today. The algorithms used to determine everything from mortgage suitability to prison sentences are racist, sexist, and prone to thinking like eugenicists.

Even there, however, the problem isn’t the AIs themselves but the data on which they are trained. AIs are just language models. They have no idea what they’re doing or saying. They are simply, quite literally, modeling themselves after the language to which they are exposed.

So the obvious answer would be to regulate and filter the language on which the AIs are trained. If we only feed them language about protecting life, not letting markets overtake the environment, finding peaceful instead of nuclear solutions to conflict, and so on, then they’ll end up behaving in great ways. If we don’t feed them our current advertisements and marketing then they won’t further refine and deploy all that manipulation and mind control.

But that’s a bit like saying we’re going to change the way children grow up by restricting the curriculum we teach them at school, without considering the way that teachers and administrators actually behave. As if kids aren’t exposed to all of other behaviors. It doesn’t matter that you teach kids to be nice to their peers if you’re not being nice to yours.

That’s because kids model our behaviors. They’re in the back seat of the car watching and learning when you curse at the driver who cut you off. AI’s are the same way. The don’t…