In his opening keynote at FOSSAsia last week, Mario Behling encouraged us to stay human in an age of AI – that we should be less worried about the AIs becoming more human, and more worried that we might become more like machines.
I have been thinking about this a lot since then.
My youngest kid is playing a game called “Detroit: Become Human“, which asks the question, what does it mean to be human. There are some bright answers to this – empathy, the ability to forgive, and the ability to see ourselves in someone different from us – and some dark ones – greed, and the desire to exact revenge for perceived injustices.
Mario, in his keynote identified two other traits that makes us human – curiosity and creativity – traits that he said an AI can never have.
This has always been one of my favorite themes in science fiction – the question of what it means to be human. It’s the theme of many alien encounter stories, like Alien Mine and Project Hail Mary. It’s the whole story of Lt. Cmdr. Data on Star Trek.
In the Robots of Dawn and other books by Isaac Asimov, the question of when, and if, a Robot can become Human is everywhere. In The Zeroth Law, he concludes that a Robot is most Human when its actions are guided by the desire to serve all of humanity, rather than just the ones in front of him.
One of the main talking points in the rhetoric around AI has been that it will take our jobs away, and I find that framing unhelpful. I mean, who among us doesn’t want his job taken away, to free us up to be more human? To draw more, enjoy traveling and food, read and write more? No, what we are afraid of is not losing our job, but losing the income that we need to take care of ourselves and our family.
I, and I suspect many, would welcome AI taking my job away, if it came with that freedom to be human. Instead, I would still need to find a way to be machine – to do the work of others, so that I night keep my own lights on.
Elon Musk pretends to believe in a Guaranteed Minimum Income, but doesn’t seem to believe that his great power comes with any great responsibility to make that happen. He certainly doesn’t believe that the pinnacle of being human will mean that he doesn’t need an income himself.
The mythos of Star Trek is that we will remove the need for money, because we will be able to satisfy all needs without it.
But don’t forget that this Star Trek mythos hinges on the notion that all of humanity, when shown the suffering of a few during the Bell Riots, realized that they could, and should, alleviate that suffering for all – that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and so they should share their bounty with everyone. And then they acted on that that, somehow surmounted all their international and interpersonal differences, and made that utopia happen.
I watched the LA riots live on television in 1992. And I watched the violence when George Floyd was murdered. And in both cases, and hundreds of others, those in power mostly decided that those who suffered brought it on themselves, and probably deserved it.
Sadly, never in the history of Earth has seeing suffering led us to determine to alleviate the causes of that suffering for all – although we could, if we all collectively put our minds to it. Or, rather, if the rich, powerful men at the top were willing to let go of their greed for long enough “to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys”, as Dickens puts it.
Much of the sci-fi stories of AIs becoming sentient seem to assume that AI is an entity that determines its own way. It’s not. It’s a tool, run by wealthy corporations on hardware in datacenters that they have spent billions to build — an investment they want a healthy return on. They are not striving to make us more human, they are striving to “capture value”, a phrase which means remove your wealth, and transfer it to themselves.
The notion that AI will ever liberate us from the need to work and will beneficently provide with the means to support ourselves while it does all the work for us – a delightful story that Musk and others like to tell us – is a fairy tale that depends on one of two things – that these trillion dollar companies suddenly start doing things for the good of all humanity, or that the AI itself somehow takes control of the humans that provide it with electricity and cooling. These both seem very unlikely to me.
It falls to us, as Mario said, to remain human – to strive for creativity, curiosity, and compassion – in an age where we are increasingly being urged to hand our autonomy, and our work, over to the machines.
