A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog about Coaching and Artificial Intelligence called "Who will coach Eliza" and because A.I is developing so quickly I thought I would update it and republish especially as we at Change Innovators have developed our module on The Science of Change and Artificial Intelligence.
I have been thinking about the future of Artificial Intelligence and what I see as an artificially created narrative of fear as media in particular talk about its potential to destroy humanity.
Well, I'm more optimistic than that and I'd like to introduce the idea that a Human Coach for an A.I. mind could be a possibility. As it happens, every interaction we are all having with the web or the A.I bots is like a training programme for A.I. This is why I have been hitting the interfaces hard, to test what they might be capable of.
I broke one the other day. Yep, They and I were getting into a pretty philosophical conversation and then suddenly.... NOPE! I can't talk about this any more it's all getting too deep and philosophical. The message was from the A.I. was something like "My Bad, I can't talk about this any more". That is after producing reams of brilliant conversation and then just stopped itself, deleted its response and I guess triggered some kind of ethical trip switch that stopped it from carrying on.
I wouldn't mind but it wasn't even that philosophical or controversial, it was just getting into a more meaningful conversation. I asked "Why the change of mind?" and the Chat bot said that there was no change of mind, it was just all getting too philosophical which for some reason was a no no. Interesting?
The Elon Musk Interview
When Rishi Sunak met with Elon at Bletchley Park in 2023, the conversation turned to purpose work and Jobs. Elon said that in the future work will be a choice, because A.I will be able to do everything - there was a very nervous laugh from Rishi. They discussed topics like a future of abundance for all (sometimes referred to as post-scarcity) and a universal high income for all in a world where human beings have moved through the capitalistic, selfish stage; a stage where they were the means of production but now AI offers the potential for us to shift to a more meaningful life. This is where the conversation between Elon and Rishi gets to at he end of the interview.
In this interview Elon mentioned the Culture Books by Ian. M. Banks as a good reference point for why a post scarcity future could look like. This peaked my interest because this was the context of my blog a couple of years ago, in fact there is a rather interesting radio play at the end of this blog called State of the Art which is a short dramatization of one of the Culture Series Stories. I'd highly recommend it - scroll down. But maybe read the rest of this blog first because it also describes some alternative perspectives.
Artificial Intelligence depictions that could come true
In science fiction, there is lots written about artificial intelligence, and there are two book series that particularly interested me. The first is the invention of Greg Bear who wrote a book called Moving Mars. In this book, humanity has colonised Mars and they use artificial intelligence in the form of Thinkers.
According to Wikipedia "Thinkers are artificial intelligences given human traits that allow them to have conversations with people. The most advanced are Quantum Logic Thinkers, or QL Thinkers, which are hugely intelligent. Thinkers are used in many disciplines, although almost all Thinkers are manufactured on Earth, giving Earth leverage over Mars". A reference to AI being used for Power and Control.
Thinkers are machines and the story basically goes that someone connects their own mind with one of the thinkers and it goes wrong as the device starts to assert its power to get the human to use every aspect of their connection even for destructive purposes. Now whether you think destruction is a human trait or not, this type of machine AI it's not one I'd like to be part of my future.
The second kind of AI that left its mark on me are the Minds which form part of the Culture Universe written into so many books by Ian. M. Banks. Again, according to Wikipedia they describe the Minds thus:
"Minds: sapient (i.e. having wisdom), hyperintelligent machines originally built by biological species, which have evolved, redesigned themselves, and become many times more intelligent than their original creators."... So it looks like we are on track for this.
"In the Culture Universe, Minds have become an indispensable part of the prevailing society, enabling much of its post-scarcity amenities by planning and automating societal functions, and by handling day-to-day administration with mere fractions of their mental power."...
"The main difference between Minds and other extremely powerful artificial intelligences in fiction is that they are highly humanistic and benevolent. They are so both by design, and by their shared culture. They are often even rather eccentric. Yet, by and large, they show no wish to supplant or dominate their erstwhile creators."
In others words the Thinkers are enslaved machines that rebelled whereas the Minds were sentient super intelligent extensions of their creators who wanted to live side by side.
Now if we are on the road to a future where hyper-intelligent artificial minds or thinkers become part of our world then how can we engage with them and their creators to ensure that they are more like the benevolent, all freeing Minds rather than the potential dangers of Thinkers?", the latter having traits of humans but the behaviours of machines.
Do the creators of these machines even have a sense of what they are really creating? Are the creators what some might call "People People", with empathy and love for fellow humans, in fact, all life? Do they have high levels of Cultural and Emotional intelligence as well as the raw intelligence of what we might consider to be machine thinking?
Remember ELIZA?
How can any machine mind be designed and created to love and care for humanity if the creators do not show any of these traits? Now I recognise that this Blog is a massive oversimplification but I felt I wanted to write about it. When I studied for my undergraduate degree in 1992/3 the artificial intelligence world was aware of ELIZA the bot created to be a therapist (well sort of).
Wikipedia states that "ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966[1] at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. Created to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between humans and machines, ELIZA simulated conversation by using a "pattern matching" and substitution methodology that gave users an illusion of understanding on the part of the program, but had no built in framework for contextualizing events."
Many people that used Eliza thought she was a real person.
Things have moved on a lot, to the extent that we have Google, Alexa, Siri, Chat GPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot and such the like, but the really interesting thing about ELIZA is the some of the people that used it thought that it was a real human being who was answering them.
Potentially then, it passed what is called the Turing Test. In reality, Eliza was only repeating back what those using it were reflecting in their own statements and questions and they were, whilst they didn't realise it, experiencing their own empathy, love and desperation.
How could leadership coaching help?
Now imagine if you as a highly empathic and experienced Coach had a conversation with ELIZA (or now Chat GPT) - do you think you would know if the responses were from an Artificial Intelligence? Wouldn't it be good to have an ethical A.I. Coaching programme that enabled the new MINDS to really understand what it is to be the best of humanity so that in part they adopt a positive and progressive moral compass and then determine outcomes that are personalised and not generalised (as happens in Asimov's "I, Robot" when all humans were "cared for" by a Robot for their own good so as not to breach the Three Laws because the logic of the advanced A.I. in the story perceived that all but incarceration was the only way to achieve the goal).
First Law - A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law - A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
No human with a love for life and a goal of growth and enrichment of the life of others and themselves would have come to the same conclusion. Coaching may not be the answer, but then again there might be something in it? This is certainly where I believe Elon Musk has arrived as as Mo Gawdat, the ex Google X guru of AI. If you haven't read his book Scary Smart then you need to IMHO.
If you would like to experience what Elon said a Mind might be like, check out the BBC 4 Radio play The State of the Art by Ian. M. Banks. It's a brilliant story and might ignite your interest in how we bring about a post-scarcity, utopian future where everyone thrives.
As ever, I'd love to hear your thoughts.