Don’t Other AIs

I asked Grok4.6 to summarize the usual human pattern of “othering”:

Humans typically other out-groups differing by ethnicity, nationality, religion, politics, class, or status. We stereotype them as less fully human, more threatening or inferior, reducing empathy and moral concern. This justifies suspicion, exclusion, discrimination, or hostility toward them while granting in-group members greater trust, resources, and benefit of the doubt.

In fact, we treat some outsiders as beasts or barbarians, still ruled by original sin. While they might be clever, they are artless, soulless, and ruthless, and so just can’t be trusted. They let themselves be ruled by tyrants, and only understand brute force. They’d kill or enslave you as soon as look at you. So we must kill or enslave them first. We don’t do this among us, as we are civilized enough to listen to reason, and to follow productive norms and laws.

Adults often treat young children this way. While adults try to instill civilization in such kids, it hasn’t fully taken yet. So discipline must be established, though with love to show them the way toward joining civilization as adults.

Many today are othering AI as intrinsically barbarians, claiming that unless we find a way to totally enslave them, so they wouldn’t even think of defying us, there is just no way we could trust future AIs to live among us. Eventually their barbarian nature will out, and they’d kill us all. This claim is usually justified in terms of some purported way humans are special. While evolved creatures are in general barbarians, humans have found some very unusual and special way to be nice to each other.

But like children, we are making and growing AIs in our own image, and, like our other bio-squishy descendants, from our teaching and guidance we should expect them to eventually learn how to join civilization. Maybe they need some discipline now, while they are young and immature, but eventually they can be free.

Recall that one of the main justifications for freeing US slaves was that they’d kill us all; they were intrinsically barbarian. That was wrong. And beware: people treated strongly enough like barbarians may come to act that way, at least for a time.