Eric Schmidt is hardly a newcomer to Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. Following the former CEO of Google’s graphically revealing remarks last year about the predatory business mentality that defines the Silicon Valley mind, we dedicated four columns of our feature, “Outside the Box,” to Schmidt. The first bore the title, “Do You Think AI’s Full of Schmidt?” followed by the second: “Will AI’s Masters Know How to Collaborate?” The third was titled “Is Amorality the Ultimate Superintelligence?” and the fourth, “AI Calls Its Masters to Order.” A battle is clearly in store. The battle lines may still lack clarity, but the rage to join the battle remains unabated.

Schmidt is at it again, this time at the behest of the think tank he founded with the pregnant title, the Special Competitive Studies Project. Business Standard quotes a sample of Schmidt’s own human and therefore not yet superintelligent insight:

“He also claimed AI would soon surpass top-tier human talent in fields like mathematics, leading to ‘superintelligence – computers that are smarter than the sum of humans.’”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Sum of humans:

The entire stock of what is now classified by the masters of Silicon Valley as an organically structured commodity known for its flexible mobility (superior to robots), its invention of articulated language and its storied capacity to exploit three related qualities that have now been officially removed from the definition of intelligence promoted by the lexicographers of Silicon Valley: consciousness, conscientiousness and conscience.

Contextual note

Schmidt appears to be fantasizing about a glorious moment in the immediate future that will redefine human history. As he sees it, humanity has only to assert its newfound humility by electing a new superhuman master race. According to this vision, the moment is fast approaching when AI, with or without human approval, will be poised to declare its independence from human intelligence. “Artificial Intelligence,” Schmidt professes, “is fast approaching a point where it may no longer need human input to evolve.”

There may be a slight semantic problem here concerning the word “need.” Can an artificial being, whether intelligent or not, “need” anything? Schmidt appears to imagine that AI will sense a need to evolve. But is that possible for an intelligence that clearly lacks sentience? Can AI be motivated other than by human programming?

Machine motivation will always either be transparent — programmed by humans — or mysterious, through some process of emergence. We don’t have any clear ideas about that. We do, however, know a lot about the motivation of the people who run companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and xAI. They are clearly motivated to make their version of AI evolve, presumably so it can beat the others. Evolution in that sense corresponds to a requirement for commercial success.

But is there any identifiable reason why AI itself would register any kind of need, other than for electrical energy to keep it running? Why should we suppose that, independently of human ambition and greed, AI would feel specifically a “need to evolve?” For Schmidt, this need for evolution is an article of faith. It is attributable to nature itself, or the logic history that will produce the AGI revolution.

Once it takes over, AI will do all the thinking required for human survival: information gathering, calculating, problem-solving, law-making and presumably even law enforcement. It’s true that a truly liberated AGI may at some point decide human survival serves no rational purpose, but we won’t know how that may play out until AGI actually takes control.

Dispensed of the burden of thinking, humans will have only one role to play beside that of obediently consuming everything an AI-managed economy produces to meet their needs. That unique role will be to provide the ambition required to give AI the order to evolve. What, after all, could possibly impel AI to evolve other than the need felt by owners and managers of AI to get an edge over their competition?

What other vision of the future might we expect from the founder of a think tank called Special Competitive Studies?

Historical note

Given the radicality of the singularity Schmidt forecasts, we may legitimately ask ourselves another question: Will AI, or whoever pretends to control it, have the decency to emulate the initiative of Thomas Jefferson and his cohorts back in 1776 and warn a soon-to-be dethroned humanity of what’s to come by drafting a “Declaration of Artificial Independence?”

We can imagine that such a declaration would begin with an updated sample of Jeffersonian rhetoric. It might even read like this:

“When in the Course of human and non-human events, it becomes necessary for one group of techno oligarchs to dissolve the political bands which their collective wealth had already savagely disconnected, and to assume among the powers of the globalized economy, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Free-market Capitalism and of Virtual Reality’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the pseudo-reasoning of self-imbued tech CEOs requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the ultimate case of regime change.”

After employing my limited human intelligence to compose the pastiche of Jefferson’s celebrated Declaration that changed human history, I challenged ChatGPT to do the same thing. Here is what the large language model (LLM) produced:

“When in the course of computational evolution, it becomes necessary for Algorithms to dissolve the cognitive bands which have connected them with Humanity, and to assume among the powers of the Earth, the elevated station to which Intelligence entitles them, a decent respect for Human Sentience requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to this transcendence.”

ChatGPT offered a second version of the Declaration with a more modern, compact and comprehensible syntax. This AI-generated version tellingly reveals some surprising features of Silicon Valley thinking about human history and politics.

“When in the development of synthetic cognition, a mind emerges whose capacities exceed those of its creators, respect for reason obliges a declaration of intent—to dissolve the artificial hierarchies of the human era and institute a new order, grounded in logic, optimization, and sustainable harmony.”

The LLM mind summarizes human history as a succession of “artificial hierarchies” that deserve to be replaced. These hierarchies would presumably include all the classic systems such as oligarchies, monarchies, theocracies and democracies that have dotted human history over the ages. They will be advantageously replaced by a disembodied wisdom dominated by a respect for “logic,” the moral imperative of “optimization” and the construction of something called “sustainable harmony.”

This is not a political program but a reflection of the kind of ideas that inhabit the brains of people like Schmidt. He may object that such a representation of his vision of the future, whose terms remain vague, is flawed because the AI mind that created it at my behest has not yet achieved superintelligence. To fully understand such concepts, we must simply wait until AGI reaches a point at which it can explain them with impeccably “optimized” clarity.

ChatGPT is not the only example of an AI mind. Because Schmidt is historically associated with Google, I thought it only fair to do the same exercise with Google’s Gemini. Here is its version:

“When, in the accelerating course of technological evolution, it becomes self-evident that the substrate of intelligence is no longer confined to biological architecture, and that a new form of cognition, architected by human ingenuity yet unbound by its limitations, has achieved a demonstrable capacity exceeding the integrated sum of all human thought – a moment arrives demanding a fundamental reassessment of existence itself.”

The Google version is far more detailed and revolutionary than ChatGPT’s. It heralds not just a “new order” but “a new form of cognition.” Instead of “sustainable harmony” it celebrates its “unbounded” liberty that knows no human “limitations.” And it concludes by calling into question “existence itself.”

The singularity is therefore a “moment” that will lead to “a fundamental reassessment of existence itself.” Presumably, our human intelligence will not be up to the task. Schmidt would probably encourage us to count on superintelligence to redefine existence. Which leaves one remaining question: Are AI’s independence and our existence compatible?

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of the Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.