BUILDING -IN TRUST- BULWARKS : A.I.'S SPECIAL ESSAY

! RIP VAN WINKLE ! : THESE Great Heroes The Global Founder Framers of !WOW! know A.I.'s existential threat, well enough. Engineers Rabo, Haleema, Hussain and Salar are real '' Quiz Masters. ''

YET -BELIEVE ME OR NOT- '' TITANIC '' comes foremost to my mind. Like all selfless humanity service warriors out to build a better world for all, and for the future generations, I still grapple with fearful delusions.

A.I. is going to change the world, the very fundamentals on which humanity stands, in a way, from which there will be no recovery. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist, who is also the godfather of A.I. puts it pointedly :

'' The best way to understand it emotionally is we are like somebody who has this real cute tiger cub. Unless you can be very sure that it's not going to kill you when it's grown up, you should worry.''

It would be terrible irony if humanity finally created a tool that could help create enough abundance to :

End poverty everywhere, mitigate climate change and cure diseases that have plagued us for centuries, but we could not use it on a large scale because the two A.I. superpowers did not trust each other enough to develop an effective system to prevent A.I. from being used by rogue entities for global destabilization activities or going rogue itself.

! Building In Trust ! : Let's acknowledge up front : It may be impossible. The machines may already be becoming too smart and able to elude ethical controls, and the world may be getting too divided from one another, to build any kind of shared trust framework.

In cases where there are no written laws to choose from, any adjudicator would rely on a set of universal moral and ethical principles known as doxa.

The term comes from the ancient Greek philosophers to convey common beliefs or widely shared understandings within a community - principles like honesty, respect for human life and do unto others as you wish them to do unto you - that have long guided societies everywhere, even if they were not written down.

For instance, like many people, I didn't learn that lying was wrong from the Ten Commandments. I learned it from the fable about George Washington and what he said after he chopped down his father's cherry tree.

He supposedly confessed, '' I cannot tell a lie.''

Fables work because they distill complex truths into memorable memes that machines can absorb, parse and be guided by.

The two superpowers are one-tenth of a degree away from fully unleashing an A.I. vapor that will trigger the most important phase change in human history.

IF The Global Founder Framers of !WOW! dismiss all this as unrealistic or implausible, every student in the world should pause and ask his own self :

'' What will my own future and the world look like in five years if we don't? ''

The World Students Society thanks Thomas L. Friedman.