Philosophers – people paid (or often not) just to think deeply and tell us what they’re thinking – aren’t exactly on the front line of the public debate. Maybe they should be.
The Philosopher’s Zone (ABC Listen and RN) recently featured two philosophers – the show’s host, Scott Stephens, and Shannon Vallor, a US-UK ethicist and philosophy professor. Their discussion – profound, stimulating, disturbing, but hopeful as well – lifted a veil from a troubling subject affecting us now and looming large in our future.
Vallor’s new book, The AI Mirror: Reclaiming our humanity in an age of machine thinking, is a deep dive into AI, or artificial intelligence: what it is and what it is not, how it might affect our future and how we should respond to it.
Years ago I remember feeling instinctively affronted by a computing scientist’s bold claim that computers would one day eclipse the best human creative talent. I never managed to articulate my reaction; now Shannon Vallor has filled in the gaps for me.
To backtrack a little: in May this year, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Noema Magazine, a Los Angeles-based “thinkers’ periodical”, that when AI becomes able to learn new things independently through chain-of-thought reasoning and then to use that knowledge to write and implement software, humans will no longer understand what it’s doing.
This could happen within five years, said Schmidt, at which point the only effective solution he can think of is to “pull the plug” by depriving the relevant computer systems of the electricity they need to work. Knowing us, I can’t see that happening.
Two days after that Schmidt interview, Noema published an article by Vallor in which she dissected the spin in public media around the arrival of “superhuman” AI, a description she rejected as not only wrong but dangerous.
Whether we’re unquestioningly enthusiastic about AI or see it as a terrifying spectre, she wrote, thinking of AI as “superhuman” devalues our human ability to act with autonomy, while crucially removing the distinction “between our conscious minds and the mechanical tools we’ve built to mirror them.”
In the ABC interview Stephens and Vallor discussed that metaphor of AI as a mirror of our own thoughts – and why our fears that it might overwhelm us are misplaced.
Vallor makes the obvious point that AI tools are not outside humanity but part of us. “They have the same distorting power, the same kind of magnifying power, the same power to confuse, to confound, but also to reveal, and allow us to see things in different ways, and new ways.”
Our confusion about AI is easy to fall into, says Vallor, but we should be aware that far from being a mind in itself, AI reads how humans rationalise information and then produces a rehash of it, based solely on stuff humans have previously created.
“AI mirrors aren’t other minds; they’re mind-reflecting devices,” says Vallor. Mirrors can’t do anything original, a truth revealed in the ancient Greek myth about Narcissus, who faded away and died as he gazed in wonderment at his own reflection in a pool.
Which brings us to AI and creativity. What I do is no more original art than ordinary gossip or your average daily news story, but all are creative acts to the extent that a person’s mind has been brought to bear on matters of human interest.
Anyone like me, whenever they are expected to produce something out of nothing, has to deal with the terror of the empty space or the blank page. The Philosopher’s Zone discussion raised the prospect of filling that gap by getting ChatGPT or a similar generative AI tool to kick-start our creative endeavour.
Always slow to take on new technology, I never thought of that; now I know it’s a dumb idea. The digital mirror that is AI offers only “reflections of the amalgamated past”, said Vallor. “These tools cannot invent patterns that we haven’t already traced for them. They can’t build futures that we haven’t yet imagined.”
The real danger behind relying on AI tools to do our thinking for us is not that they’ll somehow rise up and enslave or exterminate us. It’s because they will keep us trapped in the present, preventing us from finding alternatives to the cultural, political and environmental paths that we’re now following, which we know are unstable and unsustainable.
Making new paths into the future, said Vallor, calls for original human wisdom and creative effort, the kind of thinking “that does not just reproduce an existing pattern, but forges a new one.” True originality – true creativity – will always rely on flesh and blood.