Stephen Hawking once warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity.”
While we’ve all come to rely on AI to search the internet, choose travel routes, find new products and edit documents (not to mention operating factories, managing the electric grid, landing planes, etc.) programs such as ChatGPT (which can generate humanlike text in most any style on any topic with a simple prompt) and DALL-E (which can generate complex original images in seconds from a simple text prompt) make it clear that AI will increasingly push into realms once exclusive to humans: art, research, medicine, law.
Sufficiently complex chatbots could theoretically even replace therapists, journalists, teachers, commentators and (one can hope) politicians.
It no longer seems like science fiction to imagine a scenario in which a self-teaching computer with recursive self-improvement (i.e., one that can improve its own ability to learn exponentially) surpasses human abilities across all cognitive domains. Such an entity would then take the baton of technological progress from human hands to become perhaps the last significant thing humans ever create.
Given the inevitability of the further development of AI, the open question is, as Hawking intimated: will these creations elevate humanity to a godlike status or be the harbinger of our downfall?
There are many reasons to think that AI will, rather than killing or enslaving us as in so many sci-fi dystopias, remain a neutral and faithful servant. However, this could still be catastrophic: once technology can do everything better than we can, we will be obsolete.
Imagine a world where technology picks your clothes, cooks your breakfast, drives you to work, does your shopping, teaches your children and replies to your texts. What will you do with your life? How will you find meaning? Why will you even get up in the morning? Meaning is found by facing and overcoming challenges, yet the purpose of technology is to eliminate such challenges. Will we be able retain our humanity and find reasons to live in a world that no longer needs us?
We will. And we’ll be better for it.
It’s only in the past few hundred years that we’ve located our value as humans primarily in our productive capacities. While we tend to worry about machines becoming more human, we should worry more about the extent to which we’ve become more machine-like. We’re only afraid of the competition of AI because of how thoroughly we’ve diminished what it means to be human.
We are, each of us, an end unto ourselves, with an inherent worth unrelated to our intelligence or economic capacities. Our moral worth arises from our being, not our doing.
We need not look far to see the horrors that arise from equating human worth with economic productivity: the decimation of the natural world, the abandonment of the elderly in nursing homes, mass layoffs, homeless veterans, the often limited prospects of the disabled. Only when we treat humans as means to an end can they ever be considered “obsolete.” In a world in which intelligent machines have taken over economic production, we’ll be free to once more find our worth in terms of what we are and not what we accomplish.
Those who sew, garden, write songs, or learn a foreign language in spite of easy access to clothing, food, music and Google Translate show us the way toward a life whose purpose is not achievement or accumulation but experience, exploration and discovery. In his essay “Creative Intelligence,” Greg Satell writes: “It is only through creating a purpose that is uniquely our own that we can fully embody the human spirit.” Our egos may take a beating when we cease to be the dominant species on the planet, but we will learn to stop sacrificing our lives to the idea of progress and find meaning in simply being.
There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. We must prepare for a world of intelligent machines.
But fear not: Artificial intelligence can never replace humans. Our worth is inherent, and we are the source of meaning without which AI has no purpose.
Urie is a lifelong Idahoan and graduate of the University of Idaho. He lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.
