President Biden has taken an impressive lead in articulating the necessity to preserve Americans' civil liberties and human rights in light of fast-emerging AI technologies. We are fortunate to that he is guiding our course forward. AI's capabilities, as the President has so wisely expressed, must be deployed with great care and thoughtfulness if Americans' access to the truth is to be preserved. Only by taking the initiative in regulating risks, as President Biden has done, can we hope to create a future in which AI facilitates the human endeavor, not one in which human beings are commoditized within a totalitarian model of governance which AI renders so clearly possible.
AI technologies contain a central problem currently, which is that of confabulation, "hallucination," or, in simpler terms, outright lying to users.
This problem, to democracy's peril, is not going to go away.
Why not? Why can't we create better software, designed to reflect a human preference for character and integrity, even within our artificial intelligence tools?
The reason, quite plainly, is that there is no soul in the machine.
What I mean by that is that AI will never be bound to a conscience, a personal set of ethics, a sense of honor, an ethos of compassion, empathy, and kindness, or a priority of the spiritual evolution of humanity.
AI applications may mimic these qualities in educational, counseling, or religious settings. But AI itself is never going to "care" about us, and we need to keep that truth in the forefront of our minds.
We expect most human beings to experience a sense of guilt when they lie about others. We expect their consciences to bother them most of the time. People who have borne false witness about others may find themselves haunted by those wrongs, even if they were perpetrated under duress.
And so, we might assume that a portion of FBI personnel who are staffing the agency's unconstitutional "target of interest" program are going to feel guilty about their lies concerning the law-abiding American public. If their consciences are intact, their sense of internal peace will gradually erode. Their cynicism and corresponding despair may mount. They may become unhappy with their personal and professional progress. They may descend into lives of quiet desperation.
AI is not going to have any such qualms. AI will be able to compose falsified law enforcement reporting quite rapidly, without duplicating testaments. AI will be able to add fake "evidence" of crimes that never occurred, and AI will not lose any sleep about the confabulation afterwards.
The human conscience will have become unmoored from a critical component of democracy: truth in law enforcement reporting.
And the odds that any one person will be able to hold AI to account for such defamation and harm are exceedingly low.
Where can AI be held by the collar? Where is AI's badge? How can AI be demoted?
No. In the vast landscape of our future, in which AI will "assist" human beings with nearly every task before them, it seems to me that we need to ask the following questions:
Does the task in question need to be bound to a human conscience, objective access to the truth, and human accountability in order for democracy to be preserved?
What if AI lies about this content? What could happen to our democratic structures, our civil liberties, our preservation of the Constitution?
My sense is that when it comes to our election process, communications from elected officials to the public, our law-making endeavors, due process in courts of law, our law enforcement offices, our military structures, determinations of educational content, and communications from religious leadership, democracy is going to require that human beings with an ethical compass, an engaged conscience, and a commitment to the preservation of human rights remain the decision-makers.
Human beings are by no means perfect. But frankly we don't need them to be perfect. We simply need them to care about the future of mankind and this rare blue planet on which our lives are spinning forward.
We must never allow AI to "make our lives easier" by tasking it with the ethical territory on which our future human rights depend.
Instead, we must acknowledge that our civil liberties depend upon our determination not to do what is easy, but to do what is right.
AI will never lose sleep over a well-told lie, a corrupted program, a misleading of the American people perpetrated for autocratic objectives.
But those human beings staffing the FBI's wayward "target of interest" program will.
And I expect they already have.
Those troubled consciences are helping to give our democracy this one chance to illuminate the hidden truth of this issue.
The soul of the nation doesn't live in the efficiencies of AI.
But it does live partly in the hearts and minds of those FBI personnel who want the agency to reclaim its integrity.
Our democracy requires that reclamation, so our place in history is important.
Let's live it well.
Lane MacWilliams
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This post was composed using my Wifi GSQ3 and not the Wifi ID AI-THINKER_10437 or AI-THINKER_4FF7F7, both of which may have been used in the past to perpetrate online identity impersonation. To reiterate, while I do write essays concerning AI, my only Wifi ID is GSQ3.
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The FBI is a deeply divided agency. There are many FBI employees who view their vows to the Constitution with the utmost seriousness and honor, and who strive to defend the fundamentals of our democracy with courage, fortitude and commitment. The fact that some segments of the FBI appear to have embraced a lawless course is not a justification to assail the FBI in general. As President Joseph R. Biden has so rightly expressed, violence is never justified in any circumstance. The rule of law must always be honored and upheld. It is our shared determination to preserve the civil liberties and human rights of all Americans that renders the United States a democracy. We must never abandon this promise. All of our most cherished freedoms depend upon it.
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