We have been fascinated by automatons since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and science fiction writers have been speculating about robots and artificial intelligence since the 1920s. But now reality has caught up with imagination, and these futuristic devices are no longer in the future. We are amid a hurricane of speculation and wild promises about Artificial Intelligence, an unprecedented global sales pitch, although “sales pitch” may be the wrong term. We don’t have any voice or any choice in this matter. We will get AI, and pay for it, whether we like it or not.
A few of us – a diminishing few - who don’t much care for computers of any kind - have been wondering how we will live with this new monster. And how it will change our lives. The promoters of AI promise an electronic paradise, with all the difficult and intellectually demanding tasks done for us. Students of all ages will benefit enormously and can be confident of getting their PhDs from kindergarten onwards. AI may turn out to be a great gift to medical science. It is already a great financial gift to its investors. But it’s just possible that it may turn out to be the greatest self-inflicted catastrophe ever to befall the human race, because of its impact on the way we think, and whether we think at all.
A few books, with titles like Mind Crime and The Algorithm of Power, have tried to warn us what we are getting into, but who cares about books in this Brave New World? The “start” button has already been pressed using this technology.
AI-driven robots are on the way to learning every human skill, from delicate surgery to teaching and grading student essays. They can play chess as well or better than any human grandmaster. In a few generations, we may have a supercomputer almost clever enough to understand the Federal tax system. Economists have estimated that, when every task that can be automated has been automated, between a third and a half of all jobs will vanish. We will have nothing to do and no paycheck to do it with. Nobody seems to have noticed that robots don’t pay taxes like human workers, or that people without paychecks will have no way of buying the goods and services that robots will so efficiently create. It seems unlikely that AI robots will have enough empathy to provide unemployment benefits or social security benefits of any kind.
Some of us, influenced perhaps by the darker side of science fiction, have an uneasy feeling that robots are always inherently sinister things, especially when they take the form of fake human beings without human feelings. What if we come to trust and believe in them, as some people already do? ChatGPT is apparently being used for psychotherapy. You can see the potential for the most sophisticated AI devices to be not just liked but almost worshipped, the way some people almost worship their phones, and refuse to be parted from them.
We are vulnerable to our machines, especially when they start talking back at us. Philosophers have used the term “the ghost in the machine,” which poetically expresses the mysterious relationship between mind and body. But no philosopher, until recently, has had to confront the idea of a thinking mind entirely separate from the body, a mind in a metal box. If we’re not very careful with artificial intelligence, the ghost in the machine could eventually be us.
