Aims of Evil AI: Stupid evil
In his book, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, the late Italian economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla described a stupid person as one who acts in a way that harms others, without benefiting from the act. To Cipolla, “[a] stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.”
Stupid evil primarily occurs due to human incompetence, such as an unnecessary death caused by a surgeon’s medical error, or mayhem caused by an airplane pilot’s avoidable error. Another cause of stupid evil is negligence, when people fail to consider the adverse consequences of their actions.
One example of stupid evil is when an AI does exactly what you ask, but somehow misses the bigger picture. Suppose I ask a robot to make me a cup of coffee. On its way to the coffee machine, it encounters a puppy. Now, the robot can wait a little, or to maneuver around the puppy, but that would be costly in terms of time or energy and time. If the robot was never told that running over puppies is a bad thing, then it would be perfectly happy to do so, in pursuit of efficient coffee production. And it knows how much I like coffee!
This example highlights two kinds of stupidity. Obviously, the robot itself is stupid, for not knowing that running over puppies is bad. Second, and more importantly, the humans who programmed the robot, or those who allowed it to be sold on the market before it was sufficiently safe, have not acted intelligently. As science fiction author Robert Heinlein put it, “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
To be clear, programming a robot not to run over puppies while fetching a coffee is actually very difficult. This may come as a surprise to you, because it seems so intuitive to us. But building machines with human common sense to handle unexpected situations turned out to be a formidable technical challenge. So when I use the word ‘stupid’ to describe the humans behind the robot, I do not mean they are literally dumb. But they would be stupid if they allowed a machine into the hands of consumers without safety guarantees.
References
Cipolla, C. M. The basic laws of human stupidity. (Doubleday, 2021).