Among the subtler threats of AI is its potential to diminish what it means to be human.
Already, AI is able to present itself in such human-like fashion that we often don’t know it’s there. AI can communicate with us, Turing Test be damned, answering our questions and interacting with us just as if we were talking to someone we were standing next to.
ChatGPT can generate long, complex products of knowledge that read as human effort. It can create art that is on a par with much of what we ourselves can produce. It is capable of managing complicated processes with efficiency and accuracy far surpassing our own. Its skill at our most intellectual pastimes – chess and Go – put us to shame.
Put another way, in the words of Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, “AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves. It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.
“For example, humans are judgment-making creatures,” he wrote on The Conversation. “People rationally weigh particulars and make daily judgment calls at work and during leisure time about whom to hire, who should get a loan, what to watch and so on. But more and more of these judgments are being automated and farmed out to algorithms. As that happens, the world won’t end. But people will gradually lose the capacity to make these judgments themselves. The fewer of them people make, the worse they are likely to become at making them."
This is a serious concern. Our power of decision, and the judgment we bring to the challenges that define our lives, are deeply primal things; they are part of who we are. Handing our decision-making power and the use of our judgment may be convenient and even a relief, when it comes to the mundane; but will we have the option of stopping AI’s incursion there? Aren’t we more likely to see AI making decisions and judgments for us wherever and whenever someone in power considers it profitable? And won’t that diminish us?
Eisikovits thinks so, and he makes a good case.
There’s also the impact AI will have on the randomness we routinely experience. Chance encounters are part of all our lives, from childhood to old age, rich or poor, unless you’re a world leader or British royalty. We enjoy running into people unexpectedly, or wandering through shops unplanned, happening upon unexpected treasures. The list goes on, and we can agree that the role of chance in human experience is often a source of great joy.
What becomes of that, once AI inextricably inserts itself into our daily existence? Eisikovits argues that the planning and coordinating that AI will perform, to say nothing of its predictive power, will reduce greatly the pleasure of serendipity in daily living.
“So, no, AI won’t blow up the world. But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills,” Eisikovits concludes. “Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking.
“The human species will survive such losses. But our way of existing will be impoverished in the process. The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs. Recall T.S. Eliot’s famous closing lines of The Hollow Men: ‘This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.’”
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