This week, we spoke about the coming of the Singularity-a time in the future when artificial intelligence will become stronger than human intelligence, allowing machines to improve the power of technology at exponentially increasing rates and thereby leaving human intelligence obsolete. The Singularity requires machines to become more and more like humans, and such mechanical behavior is hard to fathom. But of even greater interest to me (at least for now) is considering what it is about human nature\/intelligence that is different from artificial intelligence and behavior, and if machines will be able to imitate and enjoy the things that make us human.<\/p>\n
Personally, I think that machines will forever be a different kind of entity, unable to enjoy the meaning or experience of life in the same way that humans do. Humans, at the end of the day, are animals with an inner wildness that is never fully tamed, but must be sacrificed in part in order to enjoy the benefits of living in society. As Adam Gropnik writes in his essay about the children’s book\u00a0Babar<\/span> (connection to my expos class), “the pleasures of civilization come with discontent at its constraints…there is allure in escaping from the constraints that button you up and hold you; there is also allure in the constraints and the buttons.” This simultaneity-the allure of wildness and autonomy coupled with the allure of civilization which is fueled by the power of loving relationships and happiness-is something artificial intelligence simply cannot understand. Indeed, AI is geared completely towards order and efficiency; it has no urge for wildness, no fascination with escaping from the order it both encounters and creates. Without such a wildness, the sacrifice\u00a0of living in society, in the midst of order, is meaningless. Nothing is truly sacrificed by the machine to exist in civilization, and having lost nothing, it cannot appreciate the meaning of the things that hold civilization together: loving relationships and happiness.<\/p>\n Moreover, artificial intelligence also lacks another essential human experience that is central to experiencing meaning in the world: struggle. Bruno Bettelheim writes: “Only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man\u00a0succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.” It is through, struggle, not success that humans are able to experience meaning in life. Computers, on the other hand, are completely focused on results. Artificial intelligence is interested only in outcomes.Can you imagine a computer finding delight in the struggle to complete a task? Of course not, computers simply load…and load…and load.\u00a0The beauty of a machine is its ability to concentrate on a task and to achieve a success that a human could not. (Think of Allan Turing’s computer in the Imitation Game) We might take pleasure in the machine’s process or in our own struggle to design and correct the machine, but the machine itself is interested in merely the result, a phenomena that humans have found time and again is quite useless as a source\u00a0of meaning in life.<\/p>\n The Singularity, with all this in mind, might be frightening in an unexpected sense. We think of the Singularity as having arrived when the machines become like us; in reality, the Singularity may be signaled\u00a0by a change in humanity, by a time when we<\/em> become like the machines. Of course, we won’t ever achieve the power\u00a0of computers once their intelligence has surpassed ours. But we may become robotic as our concerns grow ever closer to the concerns of machines, as we forget about the beauty of the process and of struggle when everything we might need is available at the press (or non-press) of a button.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week, we spoke about the coming of the Singularity-a time in the future when artificial intelligence will become stronger than human intelligence, allowing machines to improve the power of technology at exponentially increasing rates and thereby leaving human intelligence obsolete. The Singularity requires machines to become more and more like humans, and such mechanical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8096,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8096"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetknopf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}