An Illustrative Media Non Sequitur — from Fox Television’s Lisa Kennedy Montgomery — Who Told Shepard Smith that Elon Musk Is Wrong to Fear Aspects of Artificial Intelligence because — “Machines can’t make souls”

© 2014 Peter Free

 

28 October 2014

 

 

One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with momentary brainlessness is that it does not know that it is

 

Fox News is frequently a good example of what happens when Stupidity’s Moths cluster around a flame that celebrates their passionate allegiance to the reverse of intelligence.

 

Take the following illustrative sequence.

 

Genius Elon Musk expressed concern (at MIT) about the unregulated development of artificial intelligence (usually called “AI”):

 

 

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has warned about artificial intelligence before, tweeting that it could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

 

Speaking Friday at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium, Musk called it our biggest existential threat:

 

 

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.

 

So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.

 

With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.

 

© 2014 Matt McFarland, Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon’, Washington Post (24 October 2014) (paragraphs split) (the MIT interview with Musk is, here)

 

Fox News host, Shepard Smith, picked the story up.

 

He invited Fox Business (“The Independents”) host, Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery, to comment on Musk’s statement.

 

She told Fox viewers that:

 

 

You shouldn’t fear it. . . . It’s maybe twenty-five years away. . . . You can’t possibly know exactly what’s going to happen. . . . Machines can’t create souls.”

 

© 2014 Shepard Smith Reporting, Could artificial intelligence be humanity's biggest threat? Kennedy weighs in on tech guru's prediction, Fox News (27 October 2014)

 

Most of Ms. Montgomery’s rebuttal revolved around Elon Musk’s apparently self-contradictory call — given his problems with state governments prohibiting non-dealer Tesla sales — for government regulation of AI.

 

 

Evaluate the intellectual quality of Ms. Montgomery’s rebuttal

 

She apparently thinks:

 

 

that preparing for the potential occurrence of future bad things is foolish

 

that someone who ordinarily abhors excessive regulation (like Musk) should oppose regulation in all matters

 

that artificial intelligence could not possibly become a threat to us because “machines can’t create souls”

 

Presumably (one infers), if machines could create souls, they would dilute God’s market on such. Which, for unstated reasons, according to the implications of Montgomery’s rebuttal, might become a problem.

 

 

What leaps out is the non sequitur nature of Ms. Montgomery’s conclusion

 

Souls have nothing directly to do with the reasoned technological elements of Musk’s artificial intelligence warning.

 

What he probably foresees is the possibility that artificial intelligence:

 

 

being immensely quicker,

 

more knowledgeable, intellectually more widely ranging, and unemotionally analytical —

 

as well as,

 

having full and immediate access to the electronic and computer net that the developed world has become —

 

just might create control problems for human beings, not too far down the road.

 

Ms. Montgomery’s logically irrational response to this was, in essence:

 

Don’t worry, be happy — we have souls.

 

 

The moral? — Ms. Montgomery’s personal charm outpaced her ability to reason, in this instance

 

Non sequiturs like Montgomery’s “souls” comment are hard to argue with because they lack a rational basis:

 

 

(a) Is she saying that souls themselves have a protective quality against undesirable technological situations?

 

Tell that to the people maimed and incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

(b) Or is she saying that, because we have souls, God protects us?

 

Tell that to the folks calling for war against ISIS/Islamic State and everything else that could conceivably kill a few Americans.

 

Had Ms. Montgomery’s response been better thought out, she probably would have connected the elements of her rebuttal to wind up agreeing with Musk.

 

Most people would not want “machines” to dominate the soulful aspects of human life. Which was exactly his point. The only difference between Montgomery and Musk is that he is smarter, more thoughtful and foresees possible “real” problems before they arise. Pretty much the antithesis of much of Fox News on all counts.