There
have been a lot of articles in the media lately about the achievements of
Artificial Intelligence (AI). In
particular, about all the human champions of different kinds of games that AI
is beating. Chess, the game of Go, video
games. The people who are developing
this technology are extremely excited.
And there are even predictions that, in the not so distant future, AI
will be able to write novels. Imagine
novels written by machines.
But
why is it that so many people want the development of AI to proceed and to
succeed? Why do they want AI to do
better than humans, to beat humans at their own games? Why do these people seem to want a non-human
complex behavioral entity to increasingly replace humans at their tasks to the
point that there will no longer be a meaningful place for humans in the
external world? To understand this, we
have to understand why people may feel there is something intrinsically
superior about AI.
The
answer to this goes back to something that has been periodically discussed in
this column since the very first articles.
Humans among all animals have a unique level of consciousness, a unique
reflexive awareness that allows them to realize how mortal they are, how
vulnerable to organic perishability they are.
And particularly when they tended to live closer to nature, they were
vulnerable not only to organic decay, but also to natural disasters like
hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, drought and famine, extreme cold, extreme heat,
wild animals, poisonous plants and diseases. On the other hand, nature provided humans with
an organic grounding where the stimuli provided matched what their nervous
systems were capable of being receptive to.
There were also significant figure phenomena – targets for food and
materials for clothing, shelter and medicines.
But these figures were intrinsically interconnected with the organically
grounded living environment in which humans also felt interconnected.
Nevertheless,
the organic perishability aspect of nature inspired humans to gain some control
over it and to rise above it through the use first of simple tools and then
more and more complex devices and machines and ultimately modern technology.
Not only did technology help them to survive the immediate dangers of life in
or close to a more organic natural environment, but it also helped them to
separate themselves and rise above nature and the organic perishability to be
found in it. And modern technology was
good not only for protecting humans but for preserving the organic imprints that
people left on the fields of experience in which they dwelled. And this was important from another
perspective in terms of helping humans survive.
Preserving imprints helped people to create strong surrogate
immortalities for themselves – immortalities that were not so much focused on
keeping humans alive as on keeping what humans had made and done alive.
But
now with AI, we have the opportunity for a unique situation in terms of
immortality. We are creating machines that approximate and in some ways improve
on human behavior. At the same time,
they are complex behavioral entities that are created by certain humans and
that represent organic imprints that are made and preserved by those humans. However, unlike humans, they are not
susceptible to organic perishability.
And because they are seemingly immortal, humans want and will want to
both be mirrored by and to model themselves after the AI machines. And to the extent that AI becomes more
powerful and performs more tasks well, this represents greater control over and
greater protection against whatever dangers may present themselves. In other words greater intelligence means a
greater potential foundation for immortality.
And
now greater intelligence means a greater capacity for the AI machine to
re-create itself and protect itself even against human intervention. Which means that we are setting AI up with
the capacity to displace and replace humans.
And to many people, this is fine, because as they identify with AI, the
lines that separate these AI machines and humans blur. AI then becomes a vehicle by which humans can
feel themselves immortal, independent of the surrogate immortalities that they
create.
But
as AI increasingly moves towards approximating and improving on the complexity
and extensiveness of human intelligence, it still continues to miss out on the
one thing that makes human mental activity unique: a coherent organic sense of
self that is not simply interested in an instrumental resolution of problems,
but also in intrinsic self-reflection.
This is where we get into ideas about a soul and about humans being a
smaller version of a larger cosmic reflexive awareness or consciousness. This goes way beyond the more mundane
covering of instrumental problem resolution.
This goes way beyond the aptitudes of the hard sciences. This goes into the subject matter of
philosophy and religion.
This
moves away from the defined discrete stimuli, the data of science and into the
inchoate mixture of flowing, blendable, continual stimuli of the organic
natural environment mixed with the infinite continuous stimuli of the
cosmological vacuum. It becomes the
spirit that resides in the flesh.
With
cyborgs, we have a mixture of the mechanical and the organic, but in exchange
for supposed robotic immortality, we end up with the constraints that come with
the rigid robotic instrumentality
In
general, an attempt to use machines or machine components to gain a real
immortality means a loss of components that are essential for the human
condition. To try and reach for a real
immortality by identifying with AI or becoming a cyborg leads to a whole new
set of problems. One can identify with AI, but AI can eventually become so
strong and independent that it will displace humans. Even if people try to directly imitate AI by
somehow downloading their mind. Furthermore, a downloaded mind would miss out
on all the rich vibrant life experiences that stem from a fully bonded
mind-body cultivation.
With
regard to cyborgs, the addition of machine components into humans in order to
become indestructible and immortal is going to create new robotic directives
for the mind which is going to limit the full scope of organic human consciousness
and limit the capacity for rich vibrant life experiences.
To
summarize, real immortality has its costs in terms of quality of consciousness
and quality of life. And returning to
the focus of this article, identifying with AI is no solution to finding real
immortality and if it ends up displacing and replacing humans, it could just
end up putting them in a living death.
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