学进去

We humans are in trouble. We have let loose a new evolutionary process that we don’t understand and can’t control.

The latest leaps forward in artificial intelligence (AI) are rightly causing anxiety. Yet people are responding as though AI is just one more scary new technology, like electricity or cars once were. We invented it, the argument goes, so we should be able to manage it for our own benefit. Not so. I believe that this situation is new and potentially dangerous.

My thinking starts from the premise that all design anywhere in the universe is created by the evolutionary algorithm (算法). This is the process in which some kind of information is copied many times, the copies vary slightly and only some are selected to be copied again. The information is called the replicator (复制者), and our most familiar example is the gene.

But genes aren’t the only replicator, as Richard Dawkins stressed in The Selfish Gene. People copy habits, stories, words, technologies and songs; we change, recombine and pass them on in ever greater variety. This second replicator, evolving much faster than genes ever could, Dawkins called memes (模仿传递行为) — and they are selfish too.

As we face up to the recent explosion in AI, new questions arise. Could a third replicator take advantage of the first two? And what would happen if it did?

For billions of years, all of the Earth’s organisms were gene machines, until, about 2 million years ago, just one species — our ancestors — started imitating sounds, gestures and ways of processing food. They had let loose a second replicator and turned us into meme machines. Following the same principle, could a third replicator appear if some object we made started copying, varying and selecting a new kind of information?

It could, and I believe it has. Our digital technology can copy, store and spread vast amounts of information with near-perfect accuracy. While we had mostly been the ones selecting what to copy and share, that is changing now. Mindless algorithms choose which ads we see and which news stories they “think” we would like. Once a digital replicator takes off, its products will evolve for its own benefit, not ours.

All is not lost, though. We already cope with fast-evolving parasites such as viruses by using our immune systems, machines and vaccines. Now, we need to build our collective mental immunity, our critical thinking and our ability to protect our attention from all that selfish information. Taking lessons from evolution, we can stop imagining we are the controllers of our accidentally dangerous offspring and start learning how to live with them.