WORLDVIEW ETHICS — AI: A Cybernetic Appendage

The Real Function Of Artificial Intelligence Is To Extend Human Cognition

This essay will argue for a categorical deduction that was first presented in Essay 3: How Consciousness and AI Differ: Gödel-Completeness. The idea is that we know some things about AI; i.e., that it is an algorithm. Algorithms are systems of logic, so we can expect the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem to apply directly to them in all cases. Conscious minds are not systems of logic, although there is perhaps a bit of fuzziness between subject and statement when we use language to describe them.

Picture a game trail in the mountains somewhere. It exists because animals repeatedly walked that way. Now perhaps a dirt road is graded into the slope where the game trail was, enabling cars and trucks to use the route. Eventually, if enough people want to use the dirt road, it will be paved, and even more people will be able to use it. If the mountainside is our repository of knowledge as a species and the game trail is a way of speaking about things, then AI is Google Maps. It doesn’t get out there and blaze the trail, and it doesn’t know the trail as well as the animals that created it, but it can certainly help us find the shortest path from one place to another in the area.