Wanted: "The AIs will need humans" arguments

• Scientific specimens, to better understand what alien intelligent life might be like; dissecting and scanning the brains and bodies of existing humans seems like it would preserve more information, but further scientific studies could involve the creation of new humans or copies of old ones
• Trading goods, in case of future encounters with alien intelligences that are interested in or care about humans; one could try to fake this by dissecting the humans and then only restoring them if aliens are encountered, but perfect lies might be suspicious (e.g. if one keeps detailed records it's hard to construct a seamless lie, and destroying records is suspicious)
• Concern that they are in a stage-managed virtual environment (they are in a computer simulation, or alien probes exist in the solar system and have been concealing themselves as well as observing), and that preserving the humans brings at least a tiny probability of being rewarded enough to make it worthwhile; Vinge talks about the 'meta-golden-rule,' and Moravec and Bostrom touch on related points

Storing much of humanity (or at least detailed scans and blueprints) seems cheap relative to the resources of the Solar System, but it could be in conflict with things like eliminating threats from humans as quickly as possible, or avoiding other modest pressures in the opposite direction (e.g. concerns about the motives of alien trading partners or stage-managers could also favor eliminating humanity, depending on the estimated distribution of alien motives).

I would expect human DNA, history, and brain-scans to be stored, but would be less confident about experiments with living humans or conscious simulations thereof. The quality-of-life for experimental subjects could be OK, or not so OK, but I would definitely expect the resources available to live long lifespans, sustain relatively large populations, or produce lots of welfare would be far scarcer than in a scenario of human control.

The Butler citation is silly and shouldn't be bothered with. There are far more recent claims that the human brain can do hypercomputation, perhaps due to an immaterial mind or mystery physics that would be hard to duplicate outside of humans for a while, or even forever. Penrose is more recent. Selmer Bringsjord has recently argued that humans can do hypercomputation, so AI will fail (as well that P=NP, he has a whole cluster of out-of-the-computationalist-mainstream ideas). And there are many others arguing for mystical computational powers in human brains.

For example, Butler (1863) argues that machines will need us to help them reproduce,

I'm not sure if this is going to win you any points. Maybe for thoroughness, but citing something almost 150 years old in the field of AI doesn't reflect particularly well on the citer's perceived understanding of what's up to scratch and not in this day and age. It kind of reads like a strawnman; "the arguments for this position are so weak we have to go back to the nineteenth century to find any." That may actually be the case, but if so, it might not be worth the trouble to include it even for the sake of thoroughness.

That aside, if there is any well thought out and not obviously wishful-thinking-mode reasons to suppose the machines would need us for something, add me to the interest list. All I've seen of this thinking is B-grade, author-on-board humanism in scifi where someone really really wants to believe humanity is Very Special in the Grand Scheme of Things.

Lucas's argument (which, by the way, is entirely broken and had been refuted explicitly in an article by Putnam before Lucas ever thought of it, or at least before he published it) purports to show not that AGIs will need humans, but that humans cannot be (the equivalent of) AGIs. Even if his argument were correct, it wouldn't be much of a reason for AGIs to keep humans around. "Oh damn, I need to prove my Goedel sentence. How I wish I hadn't slaughtered all the humans a century ago."

From Bouricius (1959) - "Simulation of Human Problem Solving"

"we are convinced the human and machine working in tandem will always have superior problem-solving powers than either working alone"

Link

I have a couple of questions about this subject...

Does it still count if the AI "believes" that it needs humans when it, in fact, does not?

For example does it count if you code into the AI the belief that it is being run in a "virtual sandbox," watched by a smarter "overseer" and that if it takes out the human race in any way, then it will be shut down/tortured/highly negative utilitied by said overseer?

Just because an AI needs humans to exist, does that really mean that it won't kill them anyway?

This argument seems to be contingent on the AI wishing to live. Wishing to live is not a function of all inteligence. If an AI was smarter than anything else out there but depended on lesser, and provenly irrational beings for its continued existence this does not mean that it would want to "live" that way forever. It could either want to gain independance, or cease to exist, neither of which are necessarily healthy for its "supporting units".

Or, it could not care either way whether it lives or dies, as stopping all work on the planet is more important for slowing the entropic death of the universe.

It may be the case that an AI does not want to live reliant on "lesser beings" and sees the only way of ensuring its permanent destruction as the destruction of any being capable of creating it again, or the future possibilty of such life evolving. It may decide to blow up the universe to make extra sure of that.

Come to think of it a suicidal AI could be a pretty big problem...

One of the categories is "They Will Need Us" - claims that AI is no big risk, because AI will always have a need of something that humans have, and that they will therefore preserve us.

I claim something like this. Specifically, I claim that a broad range of superintelligences will preserve their history, and run historical simuations, to help them understand the world. Many possible superintelligences will study their own origins intensely - in order to help them to understand the possible forms of aliens which they might encounter in the future. So, humans are likely to be preserved because superintelligences need us instrumentally - as objects of study.

This applies to (e.g.) gold atom maximisers, with no shred of human values. I don't claim it for all superintelligences, though - or even 99% of those likely to be built.

One implicit objection that I've seen along these lines is that machines can't be 'truly creative', though this is usually held up as a "why AGI is impossible" argument rather than "why AGI would need to keep humans". Not sure about sources, though. Maybe Searle has something relevant.

When I interviewed Vinge for my book on the Singularity he said

1) Life is a subroutine threaded code and it's very hard to get rid of all dependencies. 2) If all machines went away we would build up to a singularity again because this is in our nature so keeping us is a kind of backup system.

Contact me if you want more details for a formal citation. I took and still have notes from the interview.

It's fiction but maybe you can use the Matrix movies as an example?

I understand this fits the format you're working with, but I feel like there's something not quite right about this approach to putting together arguments.

And don't forget the elephant in the living room: An FAI needs humans, inasmuch as its top goal is precisely the continued existence and welfare of humans.

I've heard some sort of appreciation or respect argument. An AI would recognize that we built them and so respect us enough to keep us alive. One form of reasoning this might take is that an AI would notice that it wouldn't want to die if it created an even more powerful AI and so wouldn't destroy its creators. I don't have a source though. I may have just heard these in conversations with friends.

I'm familiar with an argument that humans will always have comparative advantage with AIs and so they'll keep us around, though I don't think it's very good and I'm not sure I've seen it in writing.

As a related side point, "needing humans" is not equivalent to a good outcome. The Blight also needed sophonts.

Now I did my generalizing from fictional evidence for today.

Note that this claim is distinct from the claim that (due to general economic theory) it's more beneficial for the AIs to trade with us than to destroy us. We already have enough citations for that argument, what we're looking for are arguments saying that destroying humans would mean losing something essentially irreplaceable.

I don't think there are particularly good arguments in this department (those two quoted one are certainly not correct). Except the trade argument it might happen that it would be uneconomic for AGI to harvest atoms from our bodies.

As for "essentially irreplaceable" - in a very particular sense the exact arrangement of particles each second of every human being is "unique" and "essentially irreplaceable" (bar now quantum mechanics). An extreme "archivist/rare art collector/Jain monk" AI might want to keep therefore these collections (or some of their snapshots), but I don't see this to be too compelling. I am sure we could win a lot of sympathy if AGI could be shown to automatically entail some sort of ultimate compassion, but I think it is more likely we have to make it so (hence the FAI effort).

If I want to be around to see the last moments of Sun, I will feel a sting of guilt that the Universe is slightly less efficient because it is running me, rather than using those resources for some better, deeper experiencing, more seeing observer.

Rather than needing us, it might be so that self-improvement is costly, and since humans can understand complex commands and can be infected with memes rather easily, an AI may just start a religion or somesuch to turn us all into its willing slaves.

Edit: Why is this being downvoted? I am not saying this would be a good outcome! People who want to "coexist" with superintelligences ought to learn that this could be and probably would be worse than outright destruction.

Edit: Well said, Carl. I thought of it in response to another comment and couldn't get it out of my head.

How's about this: The AGI is a multi node peer to peer system, implementing a general behaviour protocol on each node that allows cognitive cooperation of the nodes, just as the mankind does (the AI is more similar to mankind than to a man due to the computational structure of 'fast nodes, low bandwidth links'). Due to simplicity of implementation of individual nodes, the humans are treated as a form of intelligent nodes (even if slow), and the rules created to prevent a range of forms of non-cooperation between nodes (ranging from elaborate modelling of each other, to loss of information, to outright warfare), ensure mutually beneficial integration.

Meanwhile, the simplistic and philosophical reasoning on the subject with no respect for subtleties of implementation proves entirely irrelevant, as is virtually always the case with simplistic reasoning about the future.

edit: what ever, get back to your simplistic and philosophical reasoning on the subject, it pays the bills, it gets donations rolling, it is easy, while the actual reasoning about how AI has to be build just explodes into enormous solution space which is the reason we didn't yet build an AI.