Recently, during a presentation on artificial intelligence, I was asked a rhetorical question: “Will most of us be intelligent enough to survive in the age of AI?”
No matter how advanced AI becomes, that's the wrong question.
The real problem is that we human Enough to survive in the AI era.
In the past three months, the capabilities of AI chatbots have expanded exponentially. New competitors to OpenAI's ChatGPT have emerged, accelerating competition and development. Much faster processing units have been introduced, dedicated to AI neural networks. The “context window” of existing AI has increased thousands of times, improving its ability to engage in long-term interactions with humans and analyze large data sets. Multimodal AI models can now generate ever more sophisticated images, voices, music, videos, and combinations of them. And finally, AI models have been combined with robotics to create androids that can respond to complex human commands in new situations.
If we ask whether we humans have the intelligence to compete with AI, the answer is: It's almost here. Because we have come to define intelligence in such a way that we are confident that AI will soon surpass human intelligence.
Today we think of intelligence as an organism's ability to identify patterns in the world, develop appropriate responses to those patterns in order to survive, and recognize those patterns in order to survive in new situations. Intelligence is the ability to respond to the unexpected, and perhaps unforeseen, with complex pattern recognition and responses.
A smart Gulf Coast fisherman like my dad recognizes complex patterns in the odd ripple on still water, the sound of the wind as it shifts, the subtle feeling of the boat floating on the tide, the smells and tastes in the air. When these come together in the right combination, they know where a school of redfish is. They then evaluate the patterns of countless past responses to find the right lure, put it on the line, cast it, adjust the retrieve speed just right to invite a strike, and then respond with the right action to set the hook and haul it in, based on their memory of a thousand redfish strikes. All of this is based on incredibly complex pattern recognition and reaction.
Will AI ever be able to match this level of pattern recognition? Will robotics ever be able to cast a line and retrieve a lure to catch a redfish? The answer is yes. This kind of multimodal sensory input and analysis is an active area of research and is advancing rapidly. Furthermore, advances in robotics will give rise to versatile robots that can cast and retrieve lures on a line, perhaps more accurately than humans.
Could such an AI-enabled android replace my father, who died over 50 years ago? The answer is no.
My father was an intelligent man, sensitive and a skilled fisherman, but to me it wasn't those qualities that made him a person, it was the qualities that made him my father.
At the very least, I carry similar genetic imprints. Far more importantly, my father raised me and endowed me with something more subtle and complex than pattern recognition and reactions. His humanity, my mother's humanity, the humanity of my relatives and friends were imprinted on my humanity not only through biological systems beyond my brain, but through constant social interactions that stimulated an unseen, intangible connection with the transcendent. That connection was spiritual. The word seems poorly defined, precisely because its meaning eludes the tools of science to explain reality. These things, passed down from human to human, cannot be replaced by an AI-powered android that happens to be able to do many of the things my father could do.
If we reduce humanity to intelligence as currently defined by science, we are doomed in the age of AI. We are replaceable. And if that is all we have to offer the world, we will be replaced. It will start with those judged to be least intelligent and least physically capable. They will be economically marginalized, unable to survive, and deemed not worthy of being kept alive. And if intelligence and physical ability are the measure of human value, then eventually AI and robots will replace us all. And that is to be expected, since we have chosen to devalue ourselves, make ourselves small, and fade into irrelevance.
Or maybe we can reclaim our true humanity from the reductionism manifested in both AI and robotics.
To achieve this, we need to recover three distinct spheres of human endeavor in our education system and cultural values: humanities, theology, and the arts.
The humanities are important because they directly address what it means to be human, something that is discovered through the study of human interactions, both living and dead. Asking what it means to be human from a humanities perspective is the most important question in the age of AI.
Theology is equally important, for it asks what it means to be human in relation to an invisible, transcendent realm: theologians ask what it means to be human in relation to the greatest framework of human experience, a realm that is beyond the comprehension of science and therefore beyond the comprehension of the concepts of our modern intellect.
And it is the arts that intentionally foster that most human of traits: creativity and the understanding of creativity by other human beings. Human interaction in all kinds of creativity involves the whole person, not just physical abilities combined with pattern recognition and reproduction. Like spirituality, the concept of the human spirit as it appears in the creative arts can seem ill-defined, since it cannot be reduced to scientifically verifiable patterns. To foster artistic creativity is to foster humanity in a humane society.
To survive and thrive, we need to reclaim our humanity, which is being lost in an age of AI with its overemphasis on intelligence and physical prowess. We need to regain a sense of transcendental framework that gives humans and all life a greater meaning than mere survival, with patterned actions in response to patterned circumstances in the environment. Only then will we see AI and robots as helpful aids in our quest to become more human and more humane, rather than replacements for our self-imposed inferiority.
Robert Hunt is director of international theological education at Perkins Theological Seminary of Southern Methodist University.
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