The other day, thinking deeply about AI and AGI and trying to integrate all the information I have taken in about it, all that I have learned through study and use, a spontaneous feeling of deep sadness came over me. While I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what the sadness was stemming from, it had something to do with loss and with the “human condition.” So this is my sharing of what that was like, a part of my response to the emergence of AI. I’m also, like a crow, attracted to shiny objects, such as AI, but this post is not that. You might say It has tinges of cynicism.
There is a realist in me who knows the genie is out of the bottle, and I can also personally see the potential benefits of AI, and I’ve been using some of the Chat and art-generators. But certain questions sort of haunt me. For instance, when even the researchers, experts, creators of AI are issuing public warnings about the potential dystopian effects and the existential risk/threat of AI, and highlight the existence now of even ChatGPT-4 ignoring or defying human directives, I have to ask: Why would humanity as a whole want to create such things? Why would any human want to create such things? Why would particular humans (around 100 people working on AI development, I’ve read) want to create such things? I can imagine many answers, some of them with spiritual overtones (Eros, the creative impulse), some of them all too human, and some darker than dark.
Has the world become, or perhaps it’s always been, just a playing field for games of chance, gambling on the promises/benefits outweighing the risks, games of winning and losing, games of ‘good and evil,’ games of life and death? Some Eastern traditions, not really knowing, imagine and say that “God” created the world as lila, sport, play, game, theater even. From a particular point of view, I can relate to this. And they also say, the world is the realm of karma, where we experience the consequences of our actions and create further consequences through actions. I relate to this as well; I wonder how many others do.
Which brings me to the thought that for many people, death, like birth into embodied life on planet Earth, has lost some of its meaning, some of its import. Rather, it seems that the process of playing/living, a perpetual now of “game,” is what is important, what has meaning. So why do we trouble ourselves pretending otherwise, why do we agitate about the “meaning crisis” or the “meta-crisis”? It’s sort of the way individual lives are perceived or considered. We live with an economic system/theory that says to lower costs, some people have to suffer and are dispensable (2M people have to lose their jobs). While AI will create new jobs, it will eliminate many jobs as well (the initial majority being the types of jobs held by women; what with that and the abortion bans and certain “influencers” calling for women to have more babies–it seems almost conspiratorial against women. I think of Ken Wilber’s talks in which he has said that the rights women have today are not assured for the future, given how labor/technology influences the role and rights of the sexes. I also think of KW speaking to research that the only consistent finding of the difference between male and female is that males prefer ‘things’ and females prefer ‘people.’ Tech is of course a male-dominated field.) But the point I am making in this paragraph is that life and death and the individual and perhaps human-ness itself, as well as such quaint ideas as “you reap what you sow” seem to be losing some importance in our meaning and value systems.
I traced that spontaneous pervasive feeling of sadness I had also to the trite and, at this point, useless thought of a “what if” question, which is somewhat related to the rift and imbalance between focus on science and the humanities. What if there were an intelligence, creativity, ambition, commitment, inventiveness, expertise, and resources equal to what is apparent in the AI field–what if all this were applied directly to problems like homelessness, immigration/refugees, hunger and poverty, mental health, revitalization and regeneration of communities, housing shortages and affordability, reform of the economic system (I think I am becoming one of those people who thinks that capitalism as it now exists and classism are gigantic problems), environmental degradation, and yes, the growing up and waking up of people, etc.? Yes, AI promises to have some beneficial effect on some of this. We shall see; I hope so. But-- who said it?-- that by solving one problem, another is created? We live with the unfolding aftermath of our creations. Karma.
There is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. Tech keeps evolving and increasing our knowledge of certain things; is it making us any wiser, more humane? There is a difference between an AI pet, even if it does have fur, and actual human interaction and particularly touch in terms of well-being and staving off loneliness. Babies suffer, some die, without touch; it’s that important; to adults it’s important too.
So I question our priorities, and our warmth, and whether we’re asking deep enough questions, peeling back the layers of all of this, not only to better grasp the many different implications of AI, but to better understand ourselves as humans. What kind of future do we want? Lots of different answers to that question, but it’s not a question that is on the radar of most people, and should be. We have choice. Humans are the creators of AI, the intelligence behind it. I sometimes see the orange/rational stage as having regressed two stages to the magical stage, with tech referred to as magic, and questions arising about the consciousness or entity-ness of machines or human-machine fusions/hybrids, as well as some of the nefarious tricks that take place in finance and such. This is not much different than the 2-stage regression by some greens to amber, and a cautionary tale perhaps about the possibility of Integral regressing to orange…
When this phase is written in the world history books, it will be recorded as the evolution of technology and the advancement of ‘civilization,’ and how remarkably it changed civilization, like the printing press and all the other significant inventions. I hope there are a few paragraphs there about how people became kinder and more compassionate and understanding, and how an Integral consciousness took hold, and there was no hunger or massive gun violence and how the earth flourished and streams ran clear and rainbows were ever more impossibly brilliant, vibrant… I truly hope that is the case. The next 6 months should tell us something.