What if Artificial Intelligence isn't a monster? What if AI makes humans more humane?
It isn't crazy-idealistic. It is just hopeful.
Today's Guest Post author looks at AI with more optimism than did yesterday's post. Yesterday's post described intellectual theft. Today, Jane Collins takes stock of the present and suggests that AI, whose "intelligence" comes from synthesizing what humans have learned, will teach us the deeper truth of human knowledge, sometimes embedded in our religions, which is our unity.
Humans are tool-makers. Artificial Intelligence is a tool. Who says tools have to be bad? Schools are a tool. Libraries are a tool. They have improved our lives immeasurably. AI could empower us to be our best selves.
Jane Collins is a college classmate. She interrupted her college years to spend a year in Israel, working on a kibbutz. She lives in Massachusetts and this is her garden. A prior Guest Post depicted her lighting a menorah with her granddaughters. She shares her thoughts and writing at https://alicet4.com.
Guest Post by Jane Collins
Time to Grow Up
Our species has had a wild and crazy adolescence. These days we’re facing the consequences of our irresponsible behavior. We can now see that our bad habits will kill us if we don’t quit. It’s time to grow up.
Can we stop eating too much meat, using too much fuel, buying too much stuff we don’t need? Can we stop using plastic? Can we stop making war?
We have to rethink everything. It’s easy to despair when we look at the work ahead of us. Maybe the civilization we have built is too powerful and its inertia too great, our addictions too ingrained. Maybe people are too greedy and violent to change.
But we are much more than our bad habits. Each of us survives infancy because someone fed us and wiped our little bottoms; such ordinary kindness is the neglected background of our lives. Nearly all of us are capable of caring for others, creating beauty, inventing new ways of doing things. And for the first time in history, we have the tools to take advantage of these assets: the internet and Artificial Intelligence.
In recent years, our culture has focused on our differences. We needed to understand how the spectrums of race, gender, and wealth affect individual lives. We needed to hear more voices than those of rich, straight, White men. With the internet, finally, all of us can speak. AI can tell us what people have already figured out about how to fix things, if we ask it the right questions.
The next stage of evolution is looking at common ground – what we share, how we’re all alike – instead of only at our differences. We can feel this common ground in a movie theater or concert. Everyone in the audience is at one with all the rest, in a way. Our attention has a common focus. Changing our culture means changing what we pay attention to. It’s time to focus on human survival.
Our attention is our singular gift, our most valuable asset. We can choose what we look at, what we like, what we buy – in both senses of the word. This is our vote. This is the direction we’re taking the culture, whether or not we want to admit our personal responsibility for it.
Status, wealth, nationality, and religion are things we made up, stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can be hard to admit that we’re really just a bunch of panicky primates trying to figure out how to run the planet before we ruin it.
Our world is changing quickly. We now have the tools we need to organize ourselves for survival. Whether we can manage this or not is an open question. Let’s not give up before we try.
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14 comments:
While I generally agree with the sentiments expressed by the guest post, I'm a little confused as to why this is filed under an "AI" category as it's barely mentioned in the post.
In response to Peter's point at the top, there's no reason why the tool of AI has to be "bad" per se, especially not in its current early developmental state. The real danger is that we create a true Artificial General Intelligence capable of rapid self improvement to the point that it could quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans and easily be able to override any "guardrails" so to speak we put in place to control it.
And creating an AGI *is* the goal of pretty much every company involved in this field of research. I myself am very VERY leary to let this metaphorical genie out of its bottle.
E pluribus unum is the exact opposite of woke.
While I admire Jane’s optimistic outlook, I couldn’t help but notice how many times she referenced the first-person (e.g. we, us our, etc…) as though “we” as a race, species or culture have some kind of collective identity and will.
While I agree that humans are tribal (as Sebastian Junger observes), I contend that nothing in human history has done more to amplify and accelerate the hyper-individualistic culture than the proliferation of digital technology. The utopia of relational human connectedness promised by the Internet never materialized; in fact quite the opposite has happened. People are more lonely and disconnected than ever. Friendships are paper-thin. I have a hard time envisioning how adding AI will help promote the “we” Jane so eloquently describes.
‘Woke’ is a term that originally meant being alert to the dangers of being black in America. Since then, it’s come to mean belief in social justice, also known as the Golden Rule, which is essential for achieving the unity implied in E Pluribus Unum. Far from being opposites, 'woke,' or social justice, is foundational to E Pluribus Unum.
And then “woke” continued to morph, into a belief that the world can be divided into oppressors and the oppressed, and that any action taken by the oppressed against oppressors is justified. The woke classify Jews as oppressors, which is how we got mobs of useful fools with heads full of woke ideology blaming Israel for rape, torture, and murder committed by Hamas against innocent Israelis on 10/7. They did this starting on 10/8, weeks before Israel took any action against Hamas in Gaza.
One of the leading “minds” of woke ideology, Ibram X Kendi, says that past discrimination can only be remedied by present discrimination. There is no equal application of the law in woke ideology, just tribal revenge.
The far right's use of the term 'woke' illustrates the alternate reality they like to seal themselves in, which is why Congress can no longer even communicate, much less compromise.
The left’s functional modern definition of woke, and of e pluribus unum, is not “out of the many, one”, but “out of the one, many”. Of those many, some groups are per se victims, some are per se victimizers, past, present and future. It makes group identity, and supposed group responsibility, primary and essential AND reductionist, formally rejecting individual value and merit, even as—especially as—ultimate aspiration, as it was for Dr. King. Either Dr. Gay’s race overcomes and effaces her apparent plagiarisms, because she is black (and left, as opposed to one of her accusers, black conservative scholar Carol Swain), or it does not.
Addendum:
Ms. Collins writes, “In recent years, our culture has focused on our differences”.
Agreed. But then she adds:
“We need to hear more voices than those of rich, straight, white men”.
More than, as in, in addition to? Or rather, to the pointed exclusion of?
One, many, or a certain some? Let’s just get identity preference right, eh?
All those I know who lean left, if they think of ‘woke’ at all, think of it as treating others the way we would want to be treated. Count on the far-white to twist it into a pejorative term and make a campaign issue out of it. After all, the term did originate in the African American vernacular.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is racial McCarthyism….
Plenty of folks who lean left are suddenly unwoke, or worse, if they decline to blame Israel primarily for recent and ongoing carnage in Israel and Gaza.
Likewise those who decline to cast allegations of anti-semitism and plagiarism as a strict function of racism....if directed at a prominent black academic.
Gosh, now I don't know if I'm woke, unwoke or anti-woke. I blame Hamas for the 1,700 Israelis they slaughtered, and I blame Israel for the 22,000 or so Palestinians they've slaughtered in retribution.
Woke, if you blame colonizer-oppressor Israel for putting Hamas in that position, and also woke if you equate in kind the Hamas killings with the Israeli.
1,700 certainly doesn't equate to 22,000, but I'm probably woke anyway because I deplore the suffering and casualties being inflicted on civilians, whether Arab or Jew.
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