The Selfish Machine? On the Power and Limitation of Natural Selection to Understand the Development of Advanced AI (Paper)
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23903/1/The%20Selfish%20Machine_%20On%20the%20Power%20and%20Limitation%20of%20Natural%20Selection%20to%20Understand%20the%20Development%20of%20Advanced%20AI.pdf Published: 24 September 2024 Abstract Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Dan Hendrycks has recently buttressed such worries by arguing that AI systems will undergo evolution by natural selection, which will endow them with instinctive drives for self-preservation, dominance and resource accumulation that are typical of evolved creatures. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not compelling as it stands. Evolutionary processes, as we point out, can be more or less Darwinian along a number of dimensions. Making use of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s framework of Darwinian spaces, we argue that the...