Why I Will Never Invest in AI

AI is destroying humanity

Originally Published on Linked In on October 29, 2017. With minor edits October 3, 2022

geralt / Pixabay

I know AI is one of the hottest areas to invest. Someone I just met asked me if I had any investments in AI and if I would ever consider investing in AI?

The answer is I don't have any AI related investments and I will never invest in AI. I know I'm passing up a potentially great moneymaking opportunity, but I have a couple of very good reasons for my answer.

I only invest in things I fully understand and I don't think I will ever be able to fully understand AI because as a human being, I have human thinking. AI is something different, it's a completely different way of thinking, an alien way of understanding things that I am not interested in knowing about. I like being around other human beings and I really treasure them all.

It turns out that there are a lot of other people, including some very smart people at MIT who have some serious questions about AI.

In this well thought out article, they have some serious questions about AI: MIT Press (The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI)

There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.

The problem comes down to the fact that even experts in the field can't predict or explain a result of AI. If the domain experts in a field can't fully explain something, no one can understand AI on that technical level. That alone is a "no go" reason for investing. Investors have to assess risk and reward. While we can easily see the reward, the risks are impossible to understand. How do we know the self driving car won't drive off the cliff (yes, you can fix that in version 2.0)? How do we know the automated whatever won't go off the rails for some minor reason? What negative impact will this have on human society? This tech could cause serious damage to our human society, and that's why I won't invest in AI.

Let me show you something else you might find either disturbing or very interesting. These images were created by Google's AI Inceptionism "looking" at regular images:

Everyone will see something different, but people who meditate may understand this to be AI looking into other dimensions, which are rich in beings we can't see in our human dimension. Buddhists call this human dimension one of delusion, where we can't see the reality of the universe. To meditators and cultivators, only in this special human dimension are we are able to cultivate and improve ourselves, because we can't see the truth of the universe. AI is fundamentally a lower level thing than the human dimension -- just look at the warped creatures in these images.

The reason I got into technology had nothing to do with money, in fact in 1985 there were only a handful of venture capitalists and a very limited market for tech companies. For the first five years in tech, I would have made more money flipping burgers and I know a lot of others who had a similar experience. You could call me a true believer in tech's power to change the world for the better and that means helping human beings improve their condition and become more enlightened. As you know, it turned out that technology was a very valuable part of the economy and people made a lot of money. I would have still done tech even if there was zero money involved and many of you reading share the same attitude.

The human domain is a place for humans, if you believe in God, then you might understand this was arranged by God and it's our place. AI is something different, it's not innately human, it's an alien culture overlain on the human dimension.