The AI Doomsday Cult

My favorite James Cameron film is the one where technology turns out to be bad.

I recently posted the next chapter of my book in progress: The Prophet of Causation, a guide to Ayn Rand’s philosophy from the perspective of the central role of the concept of causation. Chapter 3 is “A Causality Walk for Consciousness.” If you are familiar with the idea of a “causality walk,” you’ll have some idea where I’m going with this. If you aren’t, check out the chapter.

Check it out either way.

A Causality Walk for Consciousness

This chapter is primarily dedicated to understanding what consciousness is in the first place, and it identifies a wrong view of consciousness known as representationalism, which is lurking behind a bunch of disastrous philosophical errors from Descartes through Hume through Kant, up to the present day.

I cover a few recent examples, but there’s another one you’ll see everywhere right now: artificial intelligence. A lot of the fear (or excitement) about AI becoming sentient and “superintelligent” stems from a representationalist view of consciousness. If consciousness is just a stream of images or data manipulated on a kind of internal video screen—which is the key error of representationalism—then it seems plausible that an AI chatbot scraping digital text from the internet could be conscious and acquire an independent intelligence. If consciousness instead requires direct and independent contact with the world, then it’s not plausible. See my previous argument on that.

Why the Robots Won’t Eat Us

To get an idea of the extent to which people are going off the rails on this, check out a long overview of the strange rise and fall of an “AI doomer” cult.