In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez painted a stirring yet disturbing image of life in the fictional village of Macondo, a place whose inhabitants were seemingly never to be granted a “second opportunity on Earth”. In language similar in scope but markedly inferior in expression, we have recently been deluded by headlines of how Artificial Intelligence could relegate humans to a secondary status, if not totally wipe them out. While advancements in technology ought to be welcomed and their impact debated upon, it appears that the rhetoric surrounding AI has been so polarising that it has had to be expressed, to quote Charles Dickens, in the “superlative degree of comparison only”.
There is, of course, no doubt that humans and the legal and regulatory landscape that they have created have been caught off guard in the face of such a powerful technology. From piracy to privacy, the concerns surrounding the ill-effects of AI are countless. Yet, at one level, the anxiety regarding AI is born out of a deeply self-serving and narcissistic view that humans hold of themselves. For the first time in history, we are probably faced with a situation where entities other than ourselves can possibly think faster, work more efficiently, and kill more precisely. In other words, human beings are not in danger in AI’s hands; human dominance is.
Society, and the norms that it zealously upholds, is perhaps to blame for equating human dominance with human survival. From a very young age, we are taught how to be assertive. As a result, short shrift is given to values and principles that are perceived to be contrary to dominance, such as kindness, emotion and empathy. Humanity has always placed a premium on intelligence and the capability to think logically, so much so that we have distinguished ourselves from our ancestors solely by the fact that our brains have greater processing power. It is, thus, not surprising that we are acting so defensively when faced with entities that are not only more logical but may turn out to be more intelligent than us in the future.
This begs the question: what makes us human? It is certainly not being the most intelligent, as AI might prove to us in a few years. It is certainly not being the most resilient: the beetles and scorpions in the unforgiving deserts are more worthy contenders. It is perhaps in being creative, emotional, and empathetic that make us what we are. As war rages on globally, we are reminded of how brutal we can be. When the atom bomb exploded in two cities in Japan, the mushroom cloud became a symbol of not only the efficiency with which we can kill but also the dearth of human empathy. AI can, in the days to come, surprise us with its processing power, but we cannot be sure whether it can ever match the healing power of stirring prose, soothing poetry, or captivating melodies. That, in the end, is what makes us human — the ability to heal, and not just to kill.
The rhetoric surrounding the perils of AI and the corresponding fears of doomsday will surely continue. It is worth considering how humans can continue to preserve their humanity in the face of such a technological onslaught. Perhaps it is time to retrieve from the back-burner some of our 'weaker', more 'emotional', traits. Human survival, and even human dominance, depends on it. That will ensure, turning T.S. Eliot's verse on its head, that humanity does not end with a technological 'bang' but lingers on with an emotional 'whimper'.