One of my fundamental contentions is that empathy is a requirement for intelligence beyond a certain point because the consequences of lacking it are too severe to overcome.
Now if you had suggested that intelligence cannot evolve beyond a certain point unless accompanied by empathy … that would be another matter. I could easily be convinced that a social animal requires empathy almost as much as it requires eyesight, and that non-social animals cannot become very intelligent because they would never develop language.
But I see no reason to think that an evolved intelligence would have empathy for entities with whom it had no social interactions during its evolutionary history. And no a priori reason to expect any kind of empathy at all in an engineered intelligence.
Which brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps human-level AI already exists. But we don’t realize it because we have no empathy for AIs.
But I see no reason to think that an evolved intelligence would have empathy for entities with whom it had no social interactions during its evolutionary history.
Now if you had suggested that intelligence cannot evolve beyond a certain point unless accompanied by empathy … that would be another matter. I could easily be convinced that a social animal requires empathy almost as much as it requires eyesight, and that non-social animals cannot become very intelligent because they would never develop language.
But I see no reason to think that an evolved intelligence would have empathy for entities with whom it had no social interactions during its evolutionary history. And no a priori reason to expect any kind of empathy at all in an engineered intelligence.
Which brings up an interesting thought. Perhaps human-level AI already exists. But we don’t realize it because we have no empathy for AIs.
MIT’s Leonardo? Engineered super-cuteness!
The most likely location for an “unobserved” machine intelligence is probably the NSA’s basement.
However, it seems challenging to believe that a machine intelligence would need to stay hidden for very long.