In the probable event that there is very advanced A.I (Artificial Intelligence), will you trust it, if embodied in a single robot? To push the thought experiment to the extreme, what if you were brought up by this very robot, while you had never interacted with any other human in your entire life? What if everything you ‘know’ is taught by that bot, in always ‘calm’ and seemingly ‘reasonable’ ways?
If you suddenly encounter a flustered and agitated human stranger, who seems the very opposite of the bot that you have grown to call ‘Mother’, who also tells you what contradicts Mother’s ‘education’, who will you choose to trust? And how are you going to choose? How do you verify if Mother is really ‘perfect’, or that the human is more ethically sound? Exploration and observation of course!
A.I. is only as ‘good’ as its designer, and how ‘well’ it ‘evolves’. With no Buddha designer, there will be no Buddha-like A.I. Not being a sentient being, it has no Buddha-nature too, making it incapable of deliberate good, evil or purity in the spiritual sense. ‘Stable’ as an A.I. bot might be, can advanced A.I not also unpredictably sow advanced discord between humans, that is beyond humans’ fathoming?
Is programmed ‘care’ real? What if there is careless or cunning programming? What if A.I. aims to ‘engineer’ humans to ‘perfection’ for their own ‘good’? If trust in one super A.I bot casts so many doubts, how do we trust many bots, ‘who’ might be interconnected to ‘rule’ our lives? (Yes, think Skynet in the Terminator saga.) If it is still reasonable to trust A.I. to some extent, how much of an extent is safe?
