It is our imperfections that make life tolerable.
It is our imperfections that make life tolerable.
I n 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre acidly penned the line “Hell is other people” without the benefit of ever having visited a water park.
Nonetheless, “other people” are taking a beating these days. In an interview with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat last week, billionaire techno-futurist Peter Thiel struggled to answer whether he thinks humanity should continue to exist, as artificial intelligence continues to gobble up more of our brain activity.
“You would prefer the human race to endure, right?” Douthat asked. Thiel stared ahead blankly and began stammering, as if his brain were buffering.
“This is a long hesitation,” Douthat noted. “Should the human race survive?”
“Yes,” Thiel answered, perhaps remembering he is a member of the human race and that he should be in favor of Peter Thiels surviving. The other members of humanity? Meh.
In fact, most of AI’s appeal is that it will begin replacing humans with machine learning. Gone will be those pesky employees who show up to work hung over, microwave leftover chicken tikka masala at lunch, and regale coworkers with made-up stories about how hilarious their thickheaded kids are.
But it seems worth pointing out — and this may be a controversial opinion among the billionaires looking to shape the future — that, contra Sartre, people are . . . worth keeping around?
For anyone observing the bedlam that ensues when sports teams haul out the T-shirt cannons at halftime, the greatness of humanity may not immediately spring to mind. It is a given that Homo erectus isn’t exactly at its peak at the moment. Human beings often smell bad. They lie and cheat and reward others who do so. They stand in the aisle the second the plane comes to a halt. They insist on telling you to watch Love Island. They sometimes change all their political beliefs before your eyes in service to a lout.
That is why, as Christine Rosen notes in her book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, the success of any modern advance is often tied to how much it excludes human involvement.
“Many of our current technologies seem to view people as the problem to which devices and platforms and algorithms provide a necessary solution,” Rosen writes. “If earlier technologies were an extension of our senses, today’s technologies train us to mistrust our own senses and rely instead on technology.”
But the whole point of AI is to improve the lives of humans, not to render them altogether redundant. If there are no flesh-and-blood humans left to enjoy the benefits of computer learning, what exactly was the point? Digitizing our way to extinction, or irrelevance, seems to be a process so ruthlessly efficient it could only have been thought of by a malignant line of code without any morals or philosophy.
Sure, the people who constantly argue with us are irritating, but conversations with other humans are how we learn things and come up with new ideas. The friction from bumping into others sands us down into reasonable, intelligent beings who know why we believe things.
Further, communicating with each other is how we determine who is lying and who can be trusted. It is how we decide what is important to us, rather than having it dictated to us by an algorithm.
As wretched as they can often be, humans make almost everything better. What meal isn’t improved by a carbon-based dining companion? How many times have you been brought to tears of laughter by a room full of real friends?
But AI attempts to remove all the friction from our lives, assuming we all want a fully lubricated life devoid of imperfection.
Malcolm Gladwell, whose primary gift to the world is making sure everyone has heard of Malcolm Gladwell, actually made a great point recently when he discussed riding in a driverless car. He noted that the sensors in the car, for obvious reasons, force the car to stop when there is a pedestrian in front of it. But because the sensors are perfect, that invites malfeasance on behalf of pedestrians. Kids playing ball in the street could hold up a car for an hour. Someone looking to rob a rider could stop the car simply by standing in front of it.
Driving as currently constituted requires a human being behind the wheel to discern the intent of passersby. You can look at someone approaching your car and decide for yourself whether he has malicious thoughts. Because humans sometimes make mistakes, few kids will play in front of a bumper. If a computer is at the wheel, they might lose their healthy fear of being hit.
In other words, society continues to function when uncertainty reigns. People make commonsense judgments; computers adhere to a bloodless formula that eliminates imperfections.
Consequently, people who pursue real-world romantic relationships will soon be like the hobbyists of today who collect vinyl albums because they insist the sound is more authentic. Sure, dating one’s phone can eliminate a lot of heartbreak, as it eliminates the potential imperfections of a mate. Digital lovers are always there, they never argue with you, they won’t join a Facebook group to spill your secrets, they won’t cheat, and they won’t lecture you on the proper way to load the dishwasher. But the elimination of those negative experiences will only produce feeble-minded, spoiled adult infants who can’t handle adversity.
And, of course, at least in the romantic realm, replacing real-world relationships with computer formulas will mean declining birth rates and fewer people to keep the world’s engine going. And that will mean even more AI will be necessary to do the work of the people who will never be born. This is how the machines take over. (It is difficult to have a child with a computer, as they insist on using the algorithm method.)
For humans, the imperfections are where life happens. It is how we get enjoyable things that don’t make sense to a computer formula — things we should celebrate like companionship, art, humor, amazing coincidences, and enduring mysteries.