When asked what he thought the future held in the wake of his invention, Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of AI’, and one of the originators of the architecture behind generative AI Chatbots such as GPT4, was blunt: ‘my intuition is: we’re toast. This is the actual end of history’. The threat that Hinton thinks AI poses would seem to be the epitome of what the concept of evil was designed to describe: an intelligent but alien being with the means and motivation to turn the whole world to dust; an artificial Satan or Mephistopheles. AI futurists have not been slow to come up with scenarios where AI runs out of control, either deliberately or accidently. For instance, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom devised the infamous example of a ‘paperclip maximiser’. This is an AI that is designed to produce as many paperclips as it can, and ends up turning everything in the world, including living beings, into paperclips.
Nevertheless, AI-apocalypse scenarios really are just ways of expressing an underlying fear. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we seem to have created something that we don’t fully understand, and the consequences of which are potentially far-reaching and destructive to our way of life. We know that AI is capable of great harm, but it is not clear that we have the necessary concepts and vocabulary to assess these threats in moral terms. It seems doubly wrong, for instance, to describe the threat of artificial systems making us ‘toast’ as merely a bad outcome. It seems to be something much more than that. But what? Can we make sense of AI as being evil? What would this mean?
It is essential that we make sense of what it could mean to say that AI could be held responsible not just for moral wrongdoing, but also for extreme moral evil. To do this, we will have to take the scenic route. It won’t be enough to just point to the potentiality of a Terminator-style robot and label it ‘evil’: we need first to get a grip on what it would mean to call something ‘evil’ and then get a grip on how such a concept could sensibly be applied to a non-living machine.
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