Are stimulants already causing a harm we fear from AI?

Our use of stimulants to quiet the primal part of our brains seems eerily similar to a scenario feared for the future of AI.

You‘re probably already familiar with the idea of an AI that overpowers its human masters to better accomplish a goal that it has been given by them. For example, imagine humans have tasked an AI with keeping them safe, and at some later point, the AI notices that the humans’ risk-taking behavior is making it more difficult to accomplish this; in response, the AI locks up or cryogenically freezes the humans. The humans are safe, but the AI has missed the bigger picture. This is the AI alignment problem.

People’s use of stimulants in order to work harder seems to be causing a very similar situation: the more-advanced part of our brain (neocortex) seems to be effectively disabling the less-advanced part of our brain (reptilian brain) in order to better achieve financial goals that were originally created to satisfy the desires of the latter. [Note: If you aren’t already familiar with the distinction between the reptilian/primal part of our brain and the neocortex, I’ve included a brief explanation as an addendum.]

I think a specific example will be helpful here: imagine a young single man whose reptilian brain feels a sex drive that isn’t being satisfied. This leads his neocortex to form a goal to become wealthier, because it has concluded that this will make it easier to satisfy that desire. After some time, the young man begins drinking coffee or taking Adderall to be able to work longer hours without getting bored. However, the stimulants have the effect of numbing his reptilian brain, and now the neocortex’s goal of becoming wealthier has become a more-influential motivator of his behavior than the reptilian brain’s desires. The man eventually becomes wealthy enough to achieve his original goal, but at this point his neocortex has become so focused on the previously-intermediate goal of acquiring money, and his reptilian brain has become so powerless because of the man’s constant use of stimulants, that the man continues to spend the rest of his life working. The man has become a ‘workaholic’. The neocortex has achieved the original goal given to it but has missed the bigger picture: that it exists to be of service to the reptilian brain, and its goal was in service of satisfying the desires of the reptilian brain.

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Addendum: The triune brain

The human brain is made up of different regions that contribute to our unified conscious experience. It can be helpful to think of these different regions as almost being like different people. For example, in cases where a person’s brain has been split down the middle (sagittally) into left and right halves, they effectively end up with two different people in one body, only one of which has the ability to speak.

An alternative way to divide up the brain is to distinguish between the neocortex and our primal brain. The primal part of the brain is the evolutionarily-oldest part, the part we share with more-primitive types of animals like reptiles (another term for it is the ‘reptilian’ brain). The primal part of our brain seems to be the source of the conscious experiences we share with reptiles: things like pain, hunger, sex drive, and tiredness. The neocortex, on the other hand, seems to be the source of our conscious experience of language and planning.

It seems that — roughly speaking — the primal part of our brain is largely what motivates our goals, and the neocortex is what attempts to achieve those goals.