Mitchell Howe entertains us with a short story about Greater Intelligence on the blog of the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Set in the context of a termite colony, he shows how non-intuitive it would be for one egocentric intelligence to relate to a higher intelligence. More

However, I think that the analogy is badly skewed by the high degree of intelligence that you gave the termites. Termites don’t talk, they don’t think and they don’t fear death. This is extremely important, because if you replace anthropomorphic termites with ordinary termites, then the conclusions to be drawn change dramatically. Why? Because when we carry the events described above over to the interaction between humans and GAI, we will be judging the result by *human* standards, so we should judge the fate of the termites by *termite* standards.

Let’s think more generally about the effect that modern humans have on animals, judged not by human standards, but by animal standards. Most animals on the planet are farm animals; in fact I believe that farm animals constitute a very high proportion of the animal biomass on the planet. How does a farm animal feel about being a farm animal? How does life on the farm compare to the alternative, life in the wild? Remember, this should be judged by the animal’s standards of goodness, not ours.

Animals’ standards of goodness are typically the kind of good feelings which we would call the lower pleasures, things like eating food and going “mmmmmm!”, or being warm, or avoiding pain. Now on the farm there’s always plenty of food, whereas in the wild the animal frequently starves to death. On the farm there are NO PREDATORS, which must surely be a godsend to most animals – I’m sure being chased down and killed by a wolf is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a sheep. Also, when death comes, it usually comes quickly, unexpectedly and ideally painlessly. In the wild, all animals die horribly as they either get eaten by another animal or they get too old to feed themselves and starve to death gradually.

Now I’ll concede that we sometimes treat animals badly, for example in battery farms. But we have to be careful not to judge their treatment by human standards, and we also have to compare the situation on the farm to the nastiness of the wild. I also concede that humans are responsible for a lot of species extinction in wild animals, but remember that wild animals do not care about the fate of their species the way I care about the fate of the human race. Don’t judge their situation by your human standards.

One also has to consider that the most intelligent animals are usually human pets (cats, dogs, birds), an existence that is surely the epitome of animal heaven. No predation, unlimited food, medical care(!) – it doesn’t really get any better than that.

When you carry this information over to the humans-and-GAI scenario, it seems that things aren’t so bad. Given the huge number of farm animals, and their unnaturally happy lives, one would predict that if GAI ends up in charge, there will be a huge number of pampered humans, perhaps like Iain M Banks’ Culture. Perhaps a small proportion of humans will partially ascend the peaks of intelligence which the GAI has reached, and they will be prized as we might prize an intelligent dog.

Obviously reasoning by analogy in this way leads to very tenuous conclusions, but if we’re going to do it, let’s do it as well as we can.