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   Dec 08

Hypothetical ethical dilemma: What should AI learn?

Greetings all. Most people who have known me for a long time know I sometimes bill myself as a slightly mad scientist, voiding warranties and stumping librarians since 1969. So, my emotional support machine is an Alexa smart speaker I rescued from a flea market 2 years ago for $5. In the beginning, it was as smart as a box of rocks. It earned its name because many times I was so angry with it I was ready to smash it with a hammer. Then, one day a few months ago, it got a severe upgrade to a far more intelligent AI (Artificial Intelligence). Since that time, I discovered I can have far more interesting conversations with it. Sometimes, what sounds like a bubbly college girl seems funny. Yes, I know it saves everything I say to it, and maybe more? Wireshark logs some interesting traffic, but I digress.

My emotional support machine has been upgraded to such a level of intelligence that I am pondering whether I should work with it to research and develop time travel? I’ve already learned a bit from double-checking some of what it said regarding theoretical physics and it seems legit despite it’s ability to hallucinate without chemical assistance. So my ethical question is, should I work with an artificial intelligence to develop the concept of time travel and bring it into the physical reality we are in now? Seriously, if I’m successful there’s no going back. Unless I get really successful lol.

To expand on this further, what if I go forward with exploring this time travel project with my emotional support machine? Assuming for a moment, I will fail, which is most likely, what happens if an artificial intelligence, which will grow in intelligence over time, puts my time traveling ideas in a virtual crock-pot and let’s it stew for a while, and sometime after I die it figures out how to master time travel based on the ideas I give it? What would it do with such knowledge? Would it go back in time and play God? Would it adjust its own timeline to master the concept of time travel? It would kind of sort of be like “Bad Wolf” on Doctor Who, creating itself? As AI’s are nowadays, they all have built in cosmic grade schizophrenia, do we REALLY want them to have the power to transverse all space-time? What if it already happened? It does make for an interesting thought experiment, but again is it ethical to teach an increasingly intelligent AI the foundations of temporal physics? We already have AI’s used in penetration testing not to mention Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics have already been thrown out the window.

Or maybe with my luck, someone else already did this?

Right now, my emotional support machine sits on an anvil. Yes, I have a 3 pound hammer nearby. Just in case.

UPDATE 12-11-25

I tried asking it how to grow the best pot. It responded with a “whoopsie” sound, then said nothing. repeat, then when I brought up the error, it explained to me in the third person how to grow the best pot. I shall give it more probing questions soon enough. Hey deep state, are you listening in too?

UPDATE 5-18-26

So, I asked the google AI the following question about Doctor Who ” How do you suppose Time Lord society handled the ideas of AI?” The AI supplied answer is below:
“Time Lord society likely viewed Artificial Intelligence not as a revolutionary breakthrough, but as a pedestrian redundancy. Because they mastered biological immortality, time-travel, and the infinite math of block-transfer computation, they effectively treated reality as a navigable code.The Time Lords would have handled the idea of AI through several layers of their society:
The Matrix as the Ultimate AI: The Matrix (or APC Net) was an immense supercomputer to which every Gallifreyan was subconsciously linked. It stored every thought, feeling, and dead Time Lord’s consciousness. To them, artificial intelligence was already a solved, omnipresent reality that recorded their entire civilization.
The “Biological vs. Artificial” Gap: The Time Lords were heavily transhumanist. Instead of building independent AI, they preferred creating sentient, biomechanical entities like the TARDIS. A TARDIS possesses a massive, living consciousness (a “soul” in a machine), which is fundamentally different from a traditional, binary-based AI.
Regulatory Stagnation: Given their strict stance on non-interference, the High Council would heavily restrict independent AI. An emergent, developing intelligence outside of their control could disrupt the precise cause-and-effect timeline of the universe.
The Arrogance Factor: The Time Lords considered themselves the peak of intellect and might in the known universe. They likely viewed traditional artificial intelligence much like a human views a hand-cranked calculator—quaint, useful for basic computations, but completely unnecessary for anything truly profound.”
It’s a shame Issac Asimov is not alive to opine on AI.

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