I wish I had some happy trends to write about with regard to the future of people who live in the United States. Of course, if I did, my columns would probably be shorter as well as more boring. Of course, if that was in fact the case, it would mean that the average American had a better life to look forward to and that is certainly more important in the larger scheme of things than my writing longer more exciting columns.
At any rate, this particular column is going to deal with two different trends that reinforce each other and not in a positive way. First, there is the growth of A.I., a form of technology that threatens to evolve into a form of intelligence that is superior to human intelligence. And, naturally, the country that is developing this technology the fastest is the United States. The reason that American researchers give for continuing with the development of A.I., even though they know that it could displace humans, is that they are in a race with China as to who will come out on top with its different uses. In other words, they are in a race with China to see which country can dominate the process of eliminating the human race first.
At the same time that this trend is occurring, Americans are experiencing the changes from modern technology that are making their lives more and more frictionless. As their lives become more and more frictionless, they sink into deeper and deeper layers of an experiential vacuum. Which translated means deeper and deeper layers of numbness. And numbness can prevent people from being mentally engaged with the external world. Which, in turn, makes them dumber and dumber.
So, at the moment in human history when the human race is the most threatened by an external entity, namely modern technology, and, in particular A.I., with extinction, those nations that are most exposed to it, if only because they contain the individuals that are most responsible for creating it, are the most vulnerable to its negative effects.
As more and more cognitive jobs are taken over by A.I., more and more Americans will become the equivalent of A.I. couch potatoes. The real question is without any real purpose to go on living, without being stimulated enough to life to be aware that there is a death with which to be concerned after their lives end, and without therefore really appreciating the lives they are living enough to make and preserve organic imprints and to receive imprints from others, will they just sink deeper and deeper into living deaths in the experiential vacuum, until finally there will be no place for them on this planet?
Another question that might be asked is can we conceive of aspects of being human that A.I. might have trouble replicating? Well, there are two concepts related to being human that might help us find answers to this question. Neither one of these concepts is very concrete. On the contrary, they are both sophisticated concepts that come out of two very different schools of philosophical attitudes. One comes out of religion and the other comes out of psychodynamic psychology. One comes out of a spiritual approach to life and the other comes out of a materialist approach to life. The spiritual approach has given us the concept of the soul and the materialist approach has given us the concept of the sense of self. Both of these concepts represent entities that are held together by flowing blendable continual stimuli. Now the way that a soul is conceived of, it is truly indivisible. One speaks of a person having a good soul or an evil soul. I have never heard of a person having a morally divided soul or a morally fragmented soul. Neither concept makes sense. On the other hand, a sense of self is not held together so tightly. People speak of divided senses of self and fragmented senses of self. Nevertheless, even though a sense of self can be broken up into smaller pieces, it does not mean that the smaller pieces are composed of data points that can crumble into nothing and nothingness. The smaller pieces of the broken sense of self are still held together by flowing blendable continual stimuli. This is not true of entities that are composed of data such as the case of A.I. entities. No matter how many gazillions of data are used to make an A.I. entity, they are still composed of a delimited infinity of data, whereas a human entity is composed of a nondelimited infinity of stimuli. This difference must be noted and must be utilized by humans in an appropriate way to fend off any attempted takeover by A.I.
Laurence Mesirow
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