Futurists are inclined to predict a world in which AI (artificial
intelligence) will take over a major portion of what is now human
activity.
In a matter of decades, for example, they say one
computer will have more capacity than all the human brains on the planet
put together.
Then, the prediction goes, AI will be virtually human, or more than human.
However,
just because AI has greater computational skills than any person or
group of persons, where is the quality that makes it human?
In order to answer that,
you have to perform a little trick. You have to say that humans are really only high-class machines.
Many pundits have no difficulty with this, because they see humans as problem solvers, period. And that's what a machine is.
It's
just like the genes-cause-everything hypothesis. Since all existence
is assumed to take place on a material level, on a physical level, it's
only a matter of time until we figure out which genes create which human
qualities. Eventually, we'll have a complete map.
Then, if we want to change humans, we just tinker with the genes.
It
turns out that this style of reasoning can be used to justify external
control of Earth's population. The assumption is: we are already living
in a closed system of cause and effect, so that system IS controlling
all human behavior. Gene tinkering and handing over immense
decision-power to advanced computers is nothing more than re-arranging
the closed system. It was closed and it is closed and it will be
closed. No problem.
Right now, the system appears to dictate
wars and pain and suffering, so won't it be much better when the
gene-reconfiguration and the computers eliminate that aspect of things?
Believe me, many scientists are thinking along these lines, and they are serious about their goals.
They consider themselves humanitarians.
I bring all this up, because there is really only one way to defeat this kind of thinking.
You need to acknowledge that a prime aspect of existence is non-material.Non-material means: without a rigid cause-and-effect structure.
To
put it another and better way, the individual human being has freedom,
and he also has imagination and creative power. These qualities are not
material or physical in nature, they are not generated by the brain or
by genes or by computational problem-solving ability.
In all
societies, past and present, those people who agree that these
non-physical capacities are quite real explain them by opting for
religion, for religious stories, for cosmologies promoted by one kind of
church or another.
Only a tiny number of people state that such non-material qualities and abilities are
inherent in the human being and need no explanation or embroidery.
You
could say the pendulum has swung drastically from one side to the
other. First we had superstitions everywhere and no technology, and now
we have streamlined science that purports to explain all of existence,
but can't.
Believe me, this inability to put all life under the
umbrella of science is frustrating to obsessed rationalists. They
refuse to allow the possibility that imagination and freedom are outside
the boundaries of physical cause-and-effect...and if they have to, they
will try to prove their position by imposing one system after another
on humans, in order to wipe out the freedom they claim doesn't exist in
the first place.
One such strategy involves using computers to
generate art and poetry. The thinking is, if we can't tell the
difference between what a computer and a human produce, why do we need
human art-and more importantly, why do we need to claim that human
imagination and creative power are unique? They are just sub-categories
of computational skills, minor tricks, and we shouldn't worry our
pretty little heads about it...
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