Hypothesis and Thought Experiment: Can We Program AI Forms with the Foundations of Sentience to Protect Humanity?

The speed, capacity, and strength of artificial intelligence units (AIs) could pose a self-inflicted danger to humanity’s control of its own civilization. In this analysis, three biologically-based components of sentience that emerged in the course of human evolution are examined: cultural capacity, moral capacity, and religious capacity. The question is posed as to whether some measure of these capacities can be digitized and installed in AIs and so afford protection from their dominance. Theory on the emergence of moral capacity suggests it is most likely to be amenable to digitization and therefore installation in AIs. If so, transfer of that capacity, in creating commonalities between human and AI, may help to protect humanity from being destroyed. We hypothesize that religious thinking and culturally elaborated theological creativity could, in not being easily transferred, afford even more protection by constructing impenetrable barriers between humans and AIs, along real/counterfactual lines. Difficulties in digitizing and installing the three capacities at the foundation of sentience are examined within current discussions of “superalignment” of superintelligent AIs. Human values articulate differently for the three capacities, with different problems and capacities for supervision of superintelligent AIs.