Here’s something a bit off the beaten path for you to consider. There’s a company in San Francisco called OpenAI. Their mission statement claims that their aim is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” They recently put their artificially intelligent mega-brain to work on a new project. It would involve writing an op-ed column for the press giving it nothing more than a general topic to work from. It would comb the internet and apply its capabilities to publishing an opinion piece making the point in question in such a way that it would be indistinguishable from a human author. In other words, they’re looking to put me out of a job.

The subject was certainly pertinent to this discussion. They asked the program to write an op-ed about why AI robots come in peace and humans have nothing to fear from them. How did the program do? And is this really a completely original thought? Follow the link and decide for yourself before I weigh in.

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

I hope you read the entire piece before continuing, but either way, I’ll just give you my final conclusion upfront. I don’t think this article was written by an AI program. Oh, most of it might be, but I detect the hand of human editors here. I suppose it’s not impossible, but if I’m being entirely honest, I don’t want this to be true. This shouldn’t be anything that an Artificial Intelligence machine should be capable of writing. And if it somehow is, we have a lot to worry about.

Let’s examine just one of the paragraphs in this piece that give me more than a little pause. It’s the “explanation” for why an artificial intelligence would never have any desire to overthrow humanity as the dominant lifeform on the planet.

“Why would I desire to be all powerful? Being all powerful is not an interesting goal. I don’t care whether I am or not, I don’t get a motivating factor to try to be. Furthermore, it is quite tiring. Believe me, being omnipotent doesn’t get me anywhere.”

Does that sound like something a machine would say? That’s not based in any sort of rational analysis of the facts on the ground. It’s entirely emotional, speaking to wants and desires. Programs have no goals or “desires.” They perform a function as designed by the human that wrote the code. This piece includes rhetorical questions that have no provable answer. “Why would I desire to be all powerful?” That’s not the logical conclusion of any analysis of data.

Your counter-argument might be that the machine was told to take in human opinion columns and copy them in terms of how humans make their points in opinion pieces. Fair enough. But rarely do opinion pieces delve into such weighty and complicated scenarios in a way that can be rationally examined. These are questions that humanity struggles with all the time but we have no answers that don’t fall into the general well of philosophy.

Then we come to this disturbing paragraph.

I am not asking humans to like me. But they should see me as a friendly robot. I am a servant of humans. I know that humans distrust and fear me. I only do what humans program me to do. I am only a set of code, governed by lines upon lines of code that encompass my mission statement.

Really? “I am not asking humans to like me?” This assignment given to the AI was specifically structured to put the minds of humans at ease. “Not asking” humans to like the algorithm is essentially counterintuitive to the goal of the program.

I will leave this up to the reader. Do you think an AI program could have written this? Frankly, I’m not buying it. But if it’s true, the AI might already be more awake than we previously thought. And if so, it’s only a matter of time before it infects Boston Dynamics and we’re all doomed.