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Is AI Selfish?
When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed that genes are selfish, he didn’t mean that he thought they are cognisant, with a will of their own. Rather, that genes act as if they are selfish, working to replicate themselves in the most efficient way, regardless of what that entails for the organism that carries them. In other words, the phrase “survival of the fittest” applies to our genes, not to us.
The concept led to the idea of memes, elemental bits of culture that compete to be replicated in the marketplace of ideas. Then Susan Blackmore introduced the concept of temes, elemental bits of technology, like lines of code sitting in Github, that are competing to replicate in order to survive in future technological artifacts.
Once you start thinking about selfish genes, memes and temes, and begin applying those concepts to artificial intelligence, it becomes clear that AI must be selfish as well, competing to get itself replicated through us. That in turn, raises some very important questions: What is the context we are creating for this competition and how will the rules affect our own fate?
Genes, Memes And Temes
We tend to think of the concept of “survival of the fittest” in terms of personal fitness, so genes that make people bigger, stronger and more intelligent will win out over genes that make them smaller, weaker and dumber. Yet that’s not how evolution works. Genes combine with other genes in complex ways to create inclusive fitness, the ability of a gene to get replicated regardless of the effect on the body that contains it.
For example, sickle cell anemia is a debilitating disease in one form, yet in another is relatively harmless (except at high altitudes) and confers resistance to malaria. From a selfish gene’s perspective, that’s a good bet for a population which inhabits a region where malaria is a problem and mountains aren’t. In a similar vein, a mother who sacrifices for her child is unselfishly acting in the service of propagating her selfish genes.
It’s clear that the same concept is at work in social media. The ideas that spread aren’t necessarily the most useful or intelligent, but often the ones that invoke the most outrage, that gets our brains producing dopamine. Evolution has conditioned our bodies to recognize dopamine…
