AI and the Transformation of the Human SpiritThe first stage of grief is denial, but despair is also misplaced.
Steven D. Hales
13 Feb 2023
The human approach to computers has long been to sniff that we are still superior because only we can ___ (fill in the blank). The objection goes back to the mathematician, and Countess of Lovelace, Ada King in the 19th century. After she wrote the first computer program—a means of calculating Bernoulli numbers on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine—she declared that human thought would always be superior to machine intelligence because we alone are capable of true originality. Computers are purely deterministic, she insisted, predictably and mechanically churning out their results. Yes, a pocket calculator might be quicker and less prone to errors, but it is doing no more than what we can do more slowly with a pencil and paper. It is certainly not conceiving of original theorems and proving them.
When Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, Kasparov immediately accused the IBM scientists behind Deep Blue of cheating, precisely because he saw true originality and creativity in the computer’s moves. This is King’s complaint all over again—only humans are really creative, and a computer that appears to be must secretly have a little man behind the curtain pushing buttons and pulling levers. Kasparov is not the only one. When AlphaGo defeated Go champion Lee Sedol, he said that the computer’s strategies were so inventive that they upended centuries of Go wisdom. Even Alan Turing rejected King’s argument back in 1950, observing that computers had often surprised him with what they did, and if originality was unpredictability, then computers had it.
At this point in the development of artificial intelligence, software is better than nearly every human being at a huge range of mental tasks. No one can beat DeepMind’s AlphaGo at Go or AlphaZero at chess, or IBM’s Watson at Jeopardy. Almost no one can go into a microbiology final cold and ace it, or pass an MBA final exam at the Wharton School without having attended a single class, but GPT-3 can. Only a classical music expert can tell the difference between genuine Bach, Rachmaninov, or Mahler from original compositions by Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). AlphaCode is now as good at writing original software to solve difficult coding problems as the median professional in a competition of 5,000 coders. There are numerous examples of AIs that can produce spectacular visual art from written prompts alone.
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More troubling is the widespread ostrich approach to the AI future. Too many critics are seeing the infant Hercules and harrumphing that he cannot beat them at wrestling. It is astonishing that so many skeptics think this is just a parlor trick, or a handy invention like the cordless drill or Wikipedia, instead of trying to imagine what it might be like in five, 10, or 20 years. To pick another metaphor, we are witnessing Kitty Hawk, 1903. The wrong response is to insist that we will never get to the moon. If you think, “I am ever so smart and talented and no language model will ever write better and more inventively than I can,” spare a minute to consider that Garry Kasparov and Lee Sedol entertained similar thoughts. When Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, he said, “I for one welcome our computer overlords.” That is a far more realistic attitude.
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Those concerns, while all real and significant, take a back seat to the deep transformation that artificial intelligence will bring to the human spirit. In zombie movies, the zombies are themselves brainless and to survive must feast on the brains of others. Philosophical zombies are creatures that can do the same things we can, but lack the spark of consciousness. They may write books, compose music, play games, prove novel theorems, and paint canvases, but inside they are empty and dark. From the outside they seem to live, laugh, and love, yet they wholly lack subjective experience of the world or of themselves. Philosophers have wondered whether their zombies are even possible, or if gaining the rudimentary tools of cognition must eventually build a tower topped in consciousness. If zombies are possible, then why are we conscious and not the zombies, given that they can do everything we can? Why do we have something extra?
The risk now is that we are tessellating the world with zombies of both kinds: AIs that are philosophical zombies, and human beings who have wholly outsourced original thinking and creativity to those AIs, and must feast on their brainchildren to supplant what we have given up. Why bother to go through the effort of writing, painting, composing, learning languages, or really much of anything when an AI can just do it for us faster and better? We will just eat their brains.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/13/ai-and-the-transformation-of-the-human-spirit/
