June 1, Robert Hunt, director of global theological education at the SMU Dallas Perkins School of Theology, for a commentary contemplating whether AI will compromise our ability to be human and appreciate life. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading Shall we lose our humanity for AI? : https://tinyurl.com/bd636ej2
At a recent presentation on artificial intelligence, I was asked a rhetorical question: Will most of us will be intelligent enough to survive in the age of AI?
Even after all the AI advances, it is the wrong question.
The real question is whether we will be human enough to survive in an AI age.
Intelligence is not what makes us human.
By Robert Hunt
At a recent presentation on artificial intelligence, I was asked a rhetorical question: Will most of us will be intelligent enough to survive in the age of AI?
Even after all the AI advances, it is the wrong question.
The real question is whether we will be human enough to survive in an AI age.
In the last three months, there have been exponential expansions of the capabilities of AI chatbots. New competitors of OpenAI’s ChatGPT have emerged, accelerating competition and development. Vastly faster processing units devoted to AI neural networks have been introduced. The “context window” of existing AIs has increased thousands of times over, making them more capable of long-term interaction with humans and analysis of large sets of data. Multimodal AI models have appeared capable of generating ever more sophisticated images, voices, music and video — and combinations of the same. And finally, models of AI have been combined with robotics to create androids that can respond to complex human commands in novel situations.
If we are asking, as human beings, whether we have the intelligence to compete with AI , the answer is: not much longer. Because we have come to define intelligence in ways that ensure AI will soon surpass human intelligence.
Today we view intelligence as a creature’s ability to discern patterns in the outside world, develop appropriate responses to those patterns so that they can survive, and then recognize those patterns so that they can survive in new situations. Intelligence is the capacity to respond to the unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable by complex pattern recognition and response.
An intelligent Gulf Coast fisherman, someone like my father, would recognize certain complex patterns: strange ripples on still water, the sound of the wind as it shifts direction, the subtle rise of the boat as the tide changes, and the smell and taste in the air. These together, in just the right combination indicate where there is a school of redfish. And based on an assessment of countless previous patterns of response, he will find the right lure, put it on a line, cast it out, adjust the right speed of retrieval, and entice a hit. Then, based on the memory of a thousand or more redfish strikes he’ll respond with just the right pattern of actions to set the hook and bring it into the boat. It is all based on extremely complex pattern recognition and response.
Will AI ever be able to match this level of pattern recognition? Will robotics ever be able to cast the line and retrieve the lure to catch a redfish? The answer is yes. This kind of multimodal sensory input and analysis is an active area of research, and advances are being made rapidly. Moreover, advances in robotics will create a general-purpose robot capable of putting a lure on a line and casting it and retrieving it, probably more accurately than any human.
Will such an AI-powered android replace my father, who passed away over 50 years ago? The answer is no.
My father was a brilliant man, and a subtle and skilled fisherman. But these are not the characteristics that made him a human being for me; that made him my father.
At the very least, I bear a similar genetic imprint. Far more importantly, he raised me, offering me something more subtle and complex than pattern recognition and response. His humanity, and that of my mother, and relatives and friends were imprinted on my humanity through constant social interactions that stimulated not only biological systems beyond my brain, but unseen and unseeable relationships with the transcendent. The relationship was spiritual, a word that seems poorly defined precisely because its meaning eludes the tools of science to describe reality. These things that pass from human to human cannot be replaced by an AI-powered android that happens to be capable of doing a large number of things that my father was capable of doing.
If we reduce our humanity to intelligence, as currently defined by science, then we are doomed in an AI age. We are replaceable. And if that is all we offer the world, then we will be replaced. It will start with those judged least intelligent and physically capable. They will be economically marginalized until they cannot survive and are not judged valuable enough to keep alive. Then, if intelligence and physical capability are the measure of human worth, eventually AI and robots will replace us all, and justifiably so since we will have chosen to devalue and diminish ourselves, fading to insignificance.
Or we could recover our real humanity from the reductionism explicit in both AI and robotics.
Doing this depends on the recovery of three distinct realms of human endeavor within our education system and cultural values: the humanities, theology and the arts.
The humanities are critical because they ask directly what it means to be human as it is discovered by studying human-to-human interaction with humans both living and long passed away. The question of what it means to be human from a humanities perspective is the single most important question in an age of AI.
As important is theology, because it asks the question of what it means to be human in relationship to the unseen realm of transcendence. Theologians ask what it means to be human in relation to the largest framing of human experience, the realm beyond the grasp of the sciences and thus beyond the grasp of any contemporary conception of intelligence.
And it is the arts that intentionally foster that most distinctly human characteristic: creativity and its appreciation by other humans. The human-to-human engagement in creativity of all kinds involves the entirety of human persons, never just physical prowess combined with pattern recognition and reproduction. Like spirituality, the concept of a human spirit that manifests in creative art may seem ill-defined. This is because it cannot be reduced to a pattern amenable to scientific examination. To foster artistic creation is to foster humanity in a humane society.
If we are to survive and thrive, we need to recover the humanity we are losing in an AI age with its excessive emphasis on intelligence and physical prowess. We need to recover our sense of a transcendent frame that gives human life, and all life, a larger meaning than mere survival through patterned behaviors in response to patterned situations in the environment. Only when we do this will we find that AI and robots become useful helpers in our quest to become more fully human and humane, rather than potential replacements for our self-imposed sub-humanity.
Robert Hunt is the director of global theological education at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology.