The thinking world
We're not worried about jobs, we've lost who we were.
One repeated trope about AI is that it will wipe us out. The idea being that we will start a war that will be us vs machines.
This… makes very little sense. War is fought over resources, and power or to put it another way food and status (or more crudely sex). Yet conflict only really rises when two people, countries, species want the same thing. Machines are made from silicon, they don’t need food, they’re not going to try to eat us, they won’t be worried we will spread disease to them. We’re not cockroaches or even viruses, AI has as much to fear from us as we have to fear from rocks.
What we worry about is not war, but irrelevance.
I’ve been thinking non stop about a talk at The Long Now by Benjamin Bratton. He makes a claim that ChatGPT was the Galileo moment for intelligence. What does that mean? Copernicus proved the sun was the centre of the solar system, but it was Galileo who saw the moons of Jupiter. In one instance, at a glance, the earth was no longer the centre, or central character of the universe. We were part of something bigger. The universe became vast beyond imagining. Yet we also became irrelevant. Earth is a speck of dust.
Since then humanity has centralised the universe around our mind. If we aren’t literally the centre of everything, then our intelligence is so unique and precious, that we are the central characters, our intelligence is more epic and unique than a star or an entire galaxy, if earth disappeared the universe would just be radiation and balls of fire unable to perceive itself. A blind giant.
Artificial intelligence has existed for some time now. Writing, art, media contain an inert intelligence, you read it and suddenly you know something you didn’t, what else is that but artificial intelligence? This was not obvious until the Galileo moment of ChatGPT. No other animal could master human language, so we were superior, a uniqueness for millennia that is gone and won’t come back. Calling it glorified auto-correct felt good, until it begged the question, had auto-correct been intelligent too? Was it the missing link between calculators and AGI?
Other things now are obviously intelligent. Popular science books include the intelligence of Octopuses, and Forests. Intelligence is so clearly no longer human, that we can talk about it being common, we’re on a spectrum with dogs on the left and some formidable AI on the right. The instagram algorithm feels like a powerful mute manipulator now, not just a set of data centres performing maths. That’s no longer separate from intelligence, it’s no longer correct to think that intelligence is only in our neurons, if silicon blasted with electricity is intelligent, what else is.
And that’s why it’s not about the jobs. People think oh what will we do when the machines can do entry level law or can prescribe medicine. We didn’t worry when the machines could load ships or provide light or record music. We grasped flying machines and satellites and didn’t worry about displacing postmen or couriers or scribes, because we knew that progress was cementing our place as the apex creature. Now it’s not so clear. We’re not worried about the day to day, not really. We’re worried about the place of all of us. In the future (in the present?) Is there an intelligence that surpasses human intelligence? This seems inevitable. But can we even understand something more intelligent than us? Not a little more intelligent, not Einstein, but an intelligence gap we can’t cross or even comprehend. And when it does exist, how can we know? How close are we already?
Just like Galileo looking at Jupiter, it’s not that the Earth is now orbiting the Sun, it’s that the earth has been orbiting the Sun for billions of years, but we’ve just discovered it. We are inventing AI but we are also discovering what intelligence is and always has been. Now in the same way we had to rethink our place in the universe, we have to rethink how we will live and work with intelligences greater than our own. We have to work out how to put the Earth back at the centre of the universe.