Could AI's failure to capture humanness push *us* to be more human?

 

Can robots actually think, dream—and conspire to kill their maker? In I, Robot (2004), Detective Del Spooner (pictured here) investigates the suspicious death of a robotics executive, and must confront some hard truths about AI—and humanity—in the process.

 

Offering a different angle than folks thinking about antisocial implications, Noema mag's Shannon Vallor believes Silicon Valley's AI boom poses a cogent opportunity for us: to “reclaim” our own humanity. To better carve out what distinguishes real, human intelligence (and creativity) from flat, conventional, unfeeling artificiality. Vallor's essay is excerpted, below.

The idea that computers work on the same underlying principles that our brains do is not a new one. Computational theories of the mind have been circulating since the 20th century origins of computer science. There are plenty of cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers who regard computational theories of mind as a mistaken or incomplete account of how the physical brain works (myself among them), but it’s certainly not a bizarre or pseudoscientific view. …

[But] human intelligence — whether computational at the core or not — involves a rich suite of capabilities that extend well beyond what even cutting-edge AI tools do. We are more than efficient mathematical optimizers and probable next token generators. …

Being Superhuman

The word “superhuman” means “human, but more so.” To be superhuman is to have the same powers that humans do, plus other powers we lack — or to have human powers to a degree that we don’t. …

By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable to its assigned economically valuable tasks, we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. …

Reclaiming Our Humanity

… As the philosopher Albert Borgmann wrote in his 1984 book “Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,” it is precisely when a technology has nearly supplanted a vital domain of human meaning that we are able to feel and mourn what has been taken from us. It is at that moment that we often begin to resist, reclaim and rededicate ourselves to its value. …

Perhaps the ideology of “superhuman” AI, in which humans appear merely as slow and inefficient pattern matchers, could spark an even more expansive and politically significant revival of humane meaning and values. Maybe the moral and experiential poverty of AI will bring the most vitally human dimensions of our native intelligence back to the center of our attention and foster a cultural reclamation and restoration of their long-depreciated value.

What might that look like? Imagine any sector of society where the machine ideology now dominates and consider how it would look if the goal of mechanical optimization became secondary to enabling humane capabilities.

Let’s start with education. In many countries, the former ideal of a humane process of moral and intellectual formation has been reduced to optimized routines of training young people to mindlessly generate expected test-answer tokens from test-question prompts. Generative AI tools — some of which advertise themselves as “your child’s superhuman tutor” — promise to optimize even a kindergartener’s learning curve. Yet in the U.S., probably the world’s tech-savviest nation, young people’s love of reading is at its lowest levels in decades, while parents’ confidence in education systems is at a historic nadir.

What would reclaiming and reviving the humane experience of learning look like? What kind of world might our children build for themselves and future generations if we let them love to learn again, if we taught them how to rediscover and embrace their humane potential? How would that world compare to one built by children who only know how to be an underperforming machine? …

What about culture? How different would the future look if current efforts to use AI to replace human cultural outputs were stalled by a renewed affection for our own capacity to create meaning, to tell the world’s stories, to invent new forms of beauty and expression, to elevate and ornament the raw animal experience of living? What if, instead of replacing these humane vocations in media, design and the arts with mindless mechanical remixers and regurgitators of culture like ChatGPT, we asked AI developers to help us with the most meaningless tasks in our lives, the ones that drain our energy for everything else that matters? What if you never had to file another tax form? …

We are in danger of sleepwalking our way into a future where all we do is fail more miserably at being those machines ourselves. Might we be ready to wake ourselves up? In an era that rewards and recognizes only mechanical thinking, can humans still remember and reclaim what we are? I don’t think it is too late. I think now may be exactly the time.

Read the whole thing here.

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