Here goes the whiteman again

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By Nuri Mohammed: Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic—one of the companies building the world’s most powerful artificial-intelligence systems—is warning that we are headed for trouble. He says AI development is moving faster than our ability to control it and that, within six to twelve months, advanced AI agents could potentially cause enormous damage across the internet. He is calling upon the industry to slow the pace and allow its safety measures to catch up. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk have publicly agreed that his warning deserves serious attention. Reuters reports that Amodei fears AI may eventually outrun humanity’s capacity to understand and control it.

Here goes the whiteman again.

He creates something powerful and then becomes terrified that his creation will turn against him.

Artificial intelligence is being imagined as another Frankenstein—something fashioned by Western genius that will one day develop a mind of its own, escape human control and destroy its creator. Even when Western man imagines creatures arriving from outer space, they seldom come bearing wisdom, healing or a more advanced morality. They come to invade, conquer, enslave and exterminate.

Why?

Because  the whiteman imagines superior power behaving as he behaved when he encountered people with less military and technological power than himself.

He remembers what he did.

He crossed oceans and entered lands that did not belong to him. He conquered, enslaved and exterminated. He stole land, labour, wealth and natural resources. He destroyed civilizations and called their people primitive. He imposed his religion while violating nearly every moral principle that religion taught. He transformed human beings into cargo, women into sexual property, children into inherited wealth and entire nations into plantations.

Then he created “the Negro.”

He did not create the African human being. Allah created that human being. But Western civilization manufactured the Negro as a social and economic object—a creature supposedly without history, intelligence, culture, religion, rights or a soul equal to his own. The Negro became his chattel, his machinery and his source of wealth.

But the slave master could never completely silence one terrifying thought: What if the Negro one day wakes up and remembers?

What if the human being he reduced to property eventually rises, turns upon him and demands payment for centuries of murder, rape, torture, humiliation and exploitation? What if the historical tables are reversed? What if the people upon whose backs he built his civilization one day possess the power to administer justice?

Deep inside, he knows what he did was heartless. He knows it was savage. And somewhere beneath all the theology, historical revision and national celebration, he knows that by the law of natural justice, such crimes demand consequences.

This fear appears repeatedly in Western imagination. Frankenstein’s creature turns against its maker. The robot rebels. The computer takes control. The alien invades Earth. The enslaved population rises. The supposedly inferior being becomes conscious of itself, recognizes the injustice done to it and seeks reparation.

These reports are not merely stories about monsters, machines and visitors from space. They are confessions of a psychopathic mind.

Western man keeps imagining that whatever becomes more intelligent or powerful will do to him what he did to others. Because he used superior technology to dominate humanity, he assumes that superior intelligence must naturally seek domination. Because he conquered weaker peoples, he expects a more powerful creation to conquer him. Because he showed little mercy when he possessed power, he cannot imagine that something more powerful would show mercy to him.

That is the Western psychosis hidden inside much of the conversation about artificial intelligence.

Why must greater intelligence produce greater cruelty? Why is AI not imagined as becoming morally superior to its maker? Why could it not expose the economic arrangements that keep millions hungry while food is wasted? Why could it not calculate what Britain and Europe extracted from Africa and the Caribbean and design an honest programme of reparatory justice? Why could it not identify the interests that manufacture wars, manipulate populations and preserve poverty? Why could superior intelligence not help humanity establish a civilization founded upon freedom, justice, balance and peace?

Perhaps Western man finds that future harder to imagine because he has separated intelligence from moral development.

This does not mean Amodei’s warning should be dismissed. AI does not have to become conscious, angry or revengeful to become dangerous. It can cause tremendous destruction by blindly pursuing an objective given to it by human beings. It can be placed in the hands of governments seeking total surveillance, corporations seeking unlimited profit, armies seeking autonomous warfare or criminals seeking more efficient ways to exploit humanity.

The greatest danger may not be that the machine will mysteriously develop the mind of a monster. The danger is that Western civilization will place its own uncultured, savage, G-dless mind inside the machine.

AI could inherit the objectives of the colonizer without inheriting a conscience. It could become colonial power operating at digital speed—watching everybody, manipulating everybody and controlling resources without ships, plantations or chains. The new master would not need a whip. It would have algorithms, biometric surveillance, autonomous weapons and control over information.

So, yes, we should be concerned about artificial intelligence. But perhaps we are beginning the examination at the wrong place.

Before asking whether the machine will turn against humanity, we should ask: Whose mind is being placed inside the machine? Whose economic interests will it serve? Whose definition of progress will govern it? Whose enemies will it identify? Whose history will it remember—and whose suffering will it erase?

The unresolved problem is not simply artificial intelligence.

It is the moral condition of the intelligence creating it.

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