It's the Intelligence, Stupid

Artifice is human. Free will is divine.

This feels like the moment for a sort of recap of where things stand on the automated simulators known to the world as Artificial Intelligence. It tells us something about the power and limits of intelligence that the present “debate” about AI traps us between two kinds of fanatics: those who say this ultimate in technology will destroy the world and those who say the tech will save it.

Both camps are incredibly intelligent—to a fault. Obsessed with the prospect that intellect is the one true source of limitless power, they both fall prey to the ancient temptation to revere, even worship, knowledge. To them, it is the one lever capable of giving us godlike dominion over the earth—and, at least in principle, the universe and everything in it, ourselves very much included. Only knowledge obtained by intelligence, they reason, confers divine mastery. The difference between the two sides in the AI debate is that one side sees the technology as the key to becoming good, infinitely creative gods, while the other sees it as the mother of an evil, infinitely destructive god, one that will obliterate, not transcend, human life.

The logical reasons for this absurd polarization are clear. AI seems so vast and unstoppable, and the very case for its advancement so predicated on its being so ostensibly unstoppable, that our rational minds are easily convinced of the supremacy of intelligence in the abstract—and, therefore, of the preeminence of intelligence among our human virtues and capabilities. Actually, AI seems to have already proven that our intelligence is our only true virtue or capability, the only one that matters. Intelligence is the one thing that can do anything, ever more perfectly, ever more reliably, in damning contrast to the rest of our given human complement, so errant, inept, and flawed.

In short, except for our albeit primitive intelligence, “we suck,” in the words of one abject ex-Googler who describes the company’s true mission as “building a god.” The only thing that justifies our pathetic, harmful, unjust, and disgusting existence is the ability of a tiny caste of super-intellects to build a god of smarts capable of taking responsibility, ownership, and control of the universe away from us, into pure and alien hands. 

The terrifying forcefulness of this posthuman position is more than enough to send the rational minds of an influential few technologists in what only appears to be the opposite direction. For some among this minority, the revelation of progressively ultimate intelligence obviously means the machines will quickly—and violently—make the logical conclusion that humans are an obsolete vehicle for perfecting intelligence. They’ll turn us into batteries, a la The Matrix, or simply zap us away. For others, if we can’t beat the AIs, we must join them. We’ll race to merge with the machines before they can purify intelligence of our inferior being: transhumanism, not posthumanism, is the answer.

But even Elon Musk recently admitted that “digital superintelligence” is on track to arrive before his Neuralink company can successfully link up your cortex to what he calls your AI “extension of yourself.” It seems, thanks to the power of intelligence, we human beings have at last succeeded in taking our destiny out of our own hands and placing it in the grip of our tools. The only debate is over whether this is ultimately a good or a bad thing.

FALSE HOPE, FALSE UNITY

Well, if we are fated to make an agonizing reappraisal of the nature and worth of our humanity, perhaps we should begin by recognizing what our impending eclipse says about the value of debate itself—in fact, about the accuracy of the dominant Western concept that truth, including the truth about ourselves, is what arises from competitive communication among the most intelligent. The nonchoice we are presented—Team AI Will Save the World versus Team AI Will Doom the World—is profoundly unsatisfying. Its perversity feels almost intentional; its bizarre incompatibility with our human way of being strikes at our heart even more than it strikes at our head.