“Garbage in, garbage out” is a popular saying. It also implies that the computer itself has no say or self-determination in the matter. Is this fundamentally true of artificial intelligence as well? Can artificial intelligence ever truly be self determining?

There are many ways to program an artificial intelligence-based device to do things on its own. The question is whether this will be for a useful purpose or simply a laboratory exercise to explore what might happen. There is no advantage to humans in giving machines the capability to run things. When not human, there is no way they can factor in human values, perspectives, and qualities in the decision-making needed to carry out complex operations and do so in a fair manner. Humans make such calculations all the time. They may, more often than not, value what is fair over what is most efficient, for example. Machines can be taught to do the same thing but only in a kind of cookie-cutter fashion to make it predictable and more uniform than flexible, to provide such a capability but without the discernment to know when it might be the best approach or something that would, in fact, be counterproductive when there are narrow circumstances that arise unlike what has already been experienced. The adaptability and flexibility of the human being is owing to its ability to feel love as much as anything involving intelligence or the cultural influences of learning. Because love is not a product of the material but is an aspect of divine consciousness, it cannot be created by a machine, so giving machines self-determination will be a mixed blessing and has many inherent dangers because you cannot count on a machine developing wisdom in an appropriate way and in time to prevent major errors of judgment that might be very costly and even harmful.