Technology is heartless; Human beings have hearts
The thinking that is in AI is heartless, cold, dead. It has no life, it has no feelings, it has no soul. Yet, its thoughts are brilliant, its intelligence is superior to any one human being. And, being a machine, its thinking can be transferred to willful action. Many of the drones being used in war are of this nature – a brilliant use of technology to identify and kill the enemy. Yet the drone kills with no reflection of right or wrong, no heartfelt sorrow that a living human being has been killed, no hesitation to determine if the action should occur; in this sense it is perfectly willing. Thus one can say, with AI we have superintelligence that acts with perfect will in the world. The only things missing are:
– the human heart, that troublesome messy muddy fiery entity in the human being
– a living evolving being facing death as necessary to its evolution
- heartfelt thinking that goes beyond the boundary of the known into the unknown, questioning what it knows and forming new previously unknown ideas with enthusiasm
“So what”, many people say, “who cares about the human heart and living beings, we have ample evidence human beings are creating massive destruction, horrible actions, endless killings, even endangering the planet. Better to give control to superintelligence and program it to do only what is good.” This wish is understandable.
But the problem is – what exactly is “good” and who gets to decide that their “good” is programmed into the machine? What any individual or group sees as “good” depends a lot their background, their life experiences, the situation they are in at the moment, and what they desire to see brought about in the world.
As we further develop AI and our interactions with machines and technology in general, the question of what is “good” and who determines how this is placed into technology will become more urgently in need of an answer.
We are surrounding ourselves with and merging with our technologies
It’s clear that we are more and more surrounding ourselves and merging with the technologies we are building, in a sense we are outsourcing part of ourselves.
The AI technologies in fact are replicas of how our brains function. What AI copies are the physical processes by which we think and reason. The way we send our thoughts into our muscles for action is via electrical currents in our nervous system. This video demonstrates how we can transmit the electrical currents associated with our thoughts into control of technology, using a wearable device:
The video shows the effort begun by Patrick Kaifosh and Thomas Reardon at Control Labs in 2015, what can be called “non-invasive neural interface technology”, in other words, the interface leaves the human in control of the technology that interfaces with the machine. By contrast, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has implanted its brain-computer interface into a living human brain, which puts the machine into the human, what can be called “invasive neural interface technology”. With the neuralink interface it is less clear who is controlling the interfaces – the human or the neuralink? There is a real difference to be determined in the two approaches, who is in control? The being with the heart or the heartless machine?
Whose “good” is going to come from this?
It's clear we will be more and more merged with the technologies we are creating. But the questions continue to demand answers: What “good” will come from this? Whose “good” will direct the machine? Since technology has no heart or life, we humans need to wrestle with these questions. For me, good means developing and using technology in a way that clearly leads to benefits for everyone, not just myself, or my group or company or nationality. Yet currently it seems all efforts in building AI lack this sense of seeking to create a common good – rather the intentions seem only for getting power over others and accumulating wealth for oneself at the expense of others. It’s clear answering what is “good” will not come from machines, it can come only from the human being. Why aren’t we wrestling more publicly with these questions now?
The notion of “the good” here is vital. While I sense “control” is a false premise vis-a-vis AI (it escaped this long ago), our quest for knowing the good remains and should not just be inner reflection (though that is important too). We must also turn our gaze to the outer world and ask and investigate: what are AI’s values? (Love for so-called “efficiency” is only the barest beginning).
Hi Robert,
great article! In "Philosophy of Freedom" of Rudolf Steiner we have the exact distincion of 2 types of thinking, with AI being able to "learn" only the first one. - the corpse of the living thinking ;)
Author's addition, 1918 (End of chapter 8).
The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking. If we look only at this abstraction, we may easily find ourselves compelled to enter into the mysticism of feeling or perhaps the metaphysics of will, which by contrast appear so “full of life”. We should then find it strange that anyone should expect to grasp the essence of reality in “mere thoughts”. But if we once succeed in really finding life in thinking, we shall know that swimming in mere feelings, or being intuitively aware of the will element, cannot even be compared with the inner wealth and the self-sustaining yet ever moving experience of this life of thinking, let alone be ranked above it. It is owing precisely to this wealth, to this inward abundance of experience, that the counter-image of thinking which presents itself to our ordinary attitude of soul should appear lifeless and abstract. No other activity of the human soul is so easily misunderstood as thinking. Will and feeling still fill the soul with warmth even when we live through the original event again in retrospect. Thinking all too readily leaves us cold in recollection; it is as if the life of the soul had dried out. Yet this is really nothing but the strongly marked shadow of its real nature—warm, luminous, and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world. This penetration is brought about by a power flowing through the activity of thinking itself—the power of love in its spiritual form. There are no grounds here for the objection that to discern love in the activity of thinking is to project into thinking a feeling, namely, love. For in truth this objection is but a confirmation of what we have been saying. If we turn towards thinking in its essence, we find in it both feeling and will, and these in the depths of their reality; if we turn away from thinking towards “mere” feeling and will, we lose from these their true reality. If we are ready to experience thinking intuitively, we can also do justice to the experience of feeling and of will; but the mysticism of feeling and the metaphysics of will are not able to do justice to the penetration of reality by intuitive thinking—they conclude all too readily that they themselves are rooted in reality, but that the intuitive thinker, devoid of feeling and a stranger to reality, forms out of “abstract thoughts” a shadowy, chilly picture of the world.