A Place for Enslaved God
Will humans evolve into some sort of “hybrid species” — a mix of biology and technology? Does AI have a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way and it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it?
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a fancy buzzword — some now think it will mature into something that is going to revolutionize and change our human world forever. In some futuristic fantasies, even to the extent of the extinction of the human race. All apocalyptic-style thinkers are red-faced from the unbearable effort of predicting where it will lead humanity.
Long before his Twitter era, Elon Mask warned: “AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity — if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.”
John Lennox, a scientist and philosopher, said that the rise of AI might be the biggest problem for people in the 21st century. Alternatively, as one of the pioneers in the field of AI, Marvin Minsky, put it, “Anything that could give rise to smarter-than-human intelligence — in the form of artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, or neuroscience-based human intelligence enhancement — wins hands down, beyond contest, as doing the most to improve the world.”
“What will come along with AI is that we won’t get the future we want”, carefully observes Fei-Fei Li from Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute, in response to Marvin Minsky’s remark that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Minsky believed that the human mind was nothing more than a meat machine. As a result of that bold thinking, he approached intelligence as the sum or total product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts.
And that was echoed in influential podcasts, the latest media, and by academics of all stripes, bowing low to AI — to the right and curtseying; to the left and curtseying. “AI will be the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which,” said Dr. Stephen Hawking, leaving us a bit nervous.
We had abstract casual debates about this kind of technology for the last 70 years, until the subject lost its amorphous properties and crystallized into a solid figure. Significant investments were made, from $50 billion in 2020 to double this amount in 2023. Numbers indicate that the global job market will be fundamentally reshaped in the next few years. The World Economic Forum is calculating it in millions: something like 97 million jobs will be created and 85 million will be lost. Only China set itself an ambitious goal to be the #1 country number in the AI industry, and it has now officially created more than half a million jobs in that area.
It is absolutely obvious that the recent releases of ChatGPT and similar technologies that invaded all areas of our lives gave us a taste of what is to come. Never mind poor teachers grappling with essays authored by AI, as many have already mentioned in their publications. AI will serve as our teachers, testing our knowledge, teaching us, training us, and helping us develop the best of our skills and abilities.
You get up in the morning — after enjoying the dream that was spawned in your brain by special AI software; your coffee is ready, as is the forecast for the day, and all your upcoming purchases are organized. Early in the day, a customized program informs you what food you will need to eat so as to feel better during the day, and what you need to know job to perform better in your job. AI will become an invisible, hands-on assistant, snaring you permanently in a technological bubble with the thought that it will help you perform better and be better, optimizing every second of your life. Each of us will have an eternal interaction and a well-structured understanding with the machine intellect, every moment of every day. Because the Internet is now a virtual extension of our memory, it has become a repository for all accumulated information, for our shared use. In the same way, AI will replace a lot of rote mechanical and physical actions in our lives.
This begs a rhetorical question: “Will humans let themselves evolve into some sort of “hybrid species” — a fusion of biology and technology?” This idea was central to the writings of a famous novelist, Dan Brown, eventually manifesting as an all-encompassing technocentric utopia in which an artificially manufactured “Global Consciousness” will take God’s place. His famous quote: “Over the next decade, our species will become enormously interconnected at a level we are not used to, and we will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other. Our need for an external God who sits on high and judges us… will dwindle and eventually vanish.”
In a book written almost 70 years ago, “Danny Dunn and the Automatic House”, long before the full-scale euphoria of AI omnipresence, a young boy named Danny invented a machine that could help him do his homework. Eventually succeeding, he thought on how he could then invent a machine that would also do all his chores at home and so on. While exploring the reactions of the participants, authors Williams and Abrashkin had Danny’s mother say these critical but stunningly simple words: “Once you start trying to save work by putting in machines, you may find you are spending all your time taking care of the machines and not getting any fun out of them.” Meaning also, “Once you have invented all those machines, you will be constantly serving those machines yourself.”
In that ironic and wise quote, we see a reflection of how our lives align with the work of those powerful inventions. It turns out that big firms designing, testing, developing, and marketing machines employ millions, if not billions, of people in some capacity. The remainder are then involved in using them. However, the whole concept of AI can be reduced to that single thought from the book. We are in a never-ending loop of systems that help us with daily duties, accomplish tasks, or conduct research to enhance everything around us. It does not come free.
In that free fall, humans will most likely be less concerned with the meaning of life and will instead focus on a task-like world, losing sight of the bigger picture. “For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking” — is an apropos remark of Neil Postman’s in the book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
A piece with the intriguing headline: “Can AI cure a mental illness?” surfaced recently. But the main question remains: “How did the person get that mental illness?” Was it the fault of another human being? Was it excruciating loneliness, substance abuse, or self-inflicted trauma? This leads us to the moral side of the coin, the ghost of the human spirit lurking beyond all the numbers and mathematical solutions.
Inventing dating apps with millions of user-friendly profiles does not make finding love easy. People in remote villages someplace in Tajikistan, as you might guess, are usually more successful at creating lasting families than those who spend a lot of time digging through profiles. While resourceful machines algorithmically operate flawlessly, humans are missing a key component — the lack of true self-knowledge. As has been said, “The fact that we can create intelligent machines does not prove that we understand intelligence. It may, however, prove that we do not understand ourselves.”
How much power do we wield over ourselves? Can we invoke love in the moment we desire it, or stop it whenever it is no longer advantageous? Can we absolutely predict our emotions, reactions, and desires? Control our birth or death? How many psychological theories strive to prove that they can explain and predict human thoughts and behaviors? They all failed miserably.
If humans are meat-machines, then they are machines with autonomous spirits searching for eternity and lacking love, and as a result, eternal free-willed human brilliance will never be resolved by any algorithms. Creating highly sophisticated, intelligent machines does not imply that we understand where they will lead us. We don’t truly understand ourselves because it requires effort of a different type. To dissolve human individuality, you need a more potent “chemical” than artificial intelligence. The latter will always be a mere projection of our creative power, and we will always be able to supersede it.
When the Internet thrust itself into our lives in an almost identical manner to AI’s current ascension, people were divided as well. There was a lot of speculation on how it might destroy our lives and our traditional connections. It certainly did change the whole structure of our pre-internet communications, but it did not eat up our brains completely or destroy our individuality. We seemed to learn organically how to play with the vast ocean of information, with all its good and bad. AI inventions, ironically enough, may become more intelligent than most people, but as the Internet expands, AI will probably play the role of a tool or a toy in some cases. One that can be used for good or bad, but not replace God.
When bestseller novelist Dan Brown speculated that God might be replaced, he did not know what God was. And if this is a meaningless argument for you, just wait for another global deluge that can wipe out the entire human race, armed with all its technology, in a few days. Consider the 2020 pandemic as a recent case study. Many people still doubt science’s superpower because it provides very little assistance in dealing with mortality looming around every corner.
So far, AI has proven to have another useful quality: a strong stimulant to the imagination, which, along with lucrative advertising investments flowing into that area, will benefit a lot of corporations.
Buckle up and enjoy the game.
