Deep atheism and AI risk

(This essay is part of a series I’m calling “Otherness and control in the age of AGI.” I’m hoping that the individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for a summary of the essays that have been released thus far, and for a bit more about the series as a whole. PDF of the full series here.)

In my last essay, I talked about the possibility of “gentleness” towards various non-human Others – for example, animals, aliens, and AI systems. But I also highlighted the possibility of “getting eaten,” in the way that Timothy Treadwell gets eaten by a bear in Herzog’s Grizzly Man: that is, eaten in the midst of an attempt at gentleness.

Herzog accuses Treadwell of failing to take seriously the “overwhelming indifference of Nature.” And I think we can see some of the discourse about AI risk – and in particular, the strand that descends from the rationalists, and from the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular – as animated by an existential orientation similar to Herzog’s: one that approaches Nature (and also, bare intelligence) with a certain kind of fundamental mistrust. I call this orientation “deep atheism.” This essay tries to point at it.

Baby-eaters

Recall, from my last essay, that dead bear cub, and its severed arm – torn off, Herzog supposes, by a male bear seeking to stop a female from lactating. The suffering of children has always been an especially vivid objection to God’s benevolence. Dostoyevsky’s Ivan, famously, refuses heaven in protest. And see also, the theologian David Bentley Hart: “In those five-minute patches here and there when I lose faith … it’s the suffering of children that occasions it, and that alone.”

Yudkowsky has his own version: “baby-eaters.” Thus, he ridicules the wishful thinking of the “ group selectionists,” who predicted/hoped that predator populations would evolve an instinct to restrain their breeding in order to conserve the supply of prey. Not only does such sustainability-vibed behavior not occur in Nature, he says, but when the biologist Michael Wade artificially selected beetles for low-population groups, “the adults,” says Yudkowsky, “adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.” (Though: this isn’t actually a result I see in the paper Yudkowsky cites – more in footnote.¹)

Indeed, Yudkowsky made baby-eating a central sin in the story “ Three Worlds Collide,” in which humans encounter a crystalline, insectile alien species that eats their own (sentient, suffering) children. And this behavior is a core, reflectively-endorsed feature of the alien morality – one that they did not alter once they could. The word “good,” in human language, translates as “to eat children,” in theirs.

And Yudkowsky points to less fictional/artificial examples of Nature’s brutality as well. For example, the parasitic wasps that put Darwin in problems-of-evil mode ² (see here, for nightmare-ish, inside-the-caterpillar imagery of the larvae eating their way out from the inside). Or the old elephants who die of starvation when their last set of teeth falls out. Indeed (though this isn’t Yudkowsky’s example), if you want some baby-eating straight up, consider this mother crab, standing amid a writhing pile of crab babies, snacking.³

Part of the vibe, here, is that old (albeit: still-underrated) thing, from Tennyson, about the color of nature’s teeth and claws. Dawkins, as often, is eloquent: