AI lets us be human

From Daniel Kokotaljo’s AI 2027 report to the grave warnings of Geoffrey Hinton, there is currently no shortage of dystopian omens portending a near horizon where human intelligence is not simply surpassed by the artificial – but overwritten. There is, however, a silent, yet powerful irony squatting in the middle of the virtual room. Namely, the entrance of AI onto the world stage creates the opportunity for us to rediscover afresh what makes us human.

Once, the aim of education was the holistic and harmonic development of the individual into a mature citizen of the world. A general understanding of science, of poetry and art, of languages, history and culture, were all considered integral and necessary to inform this unified end, laying, at the same time, the foundation for later specialization. In short, the inner development of the individual human being rather than merely the outer practical abilities was the soul of the system.

Yet, as the decade upon decade rolled by, the individual came to weigh ever less against the fine mechanics of modern society. The applicable came to replace the potential, the quantifiable the qualitative, the certain the imaginative; logical deduction infringed on the domain of creative hypothesis; speedy calculation valued higher than a calm, thorough understanding. Memorization of axioms and formal rules seized the throne, while the former ruler – a more intuitive and geometric reasoning – was relegated to exist as subject within the new rigid kingdom – or not at all. Critical thought, which questioned the foundation of the ruler, was unwanted. And so, gradually, the sense of a developing inner sovereignty and freedom was put aside, as the pupil or student increasingly became all-consumed with being overheard saying the right word at the right time to impress a teacher or professor.

But over time, this mode of thinking does not simply stay hermetically within the educational system but steadily becomes the way we think about everything. We come to enjoy logical systems and trust in the surety of their building blocks to such an extent that when fundamental paradoxes questioning these arise, we shy away. We wish to brush them off as coincidences. If they persist, we instinctively look for ways to explain them away within the axiomatic framework. And thus, we become a community, a society of logicians. We know all the rules inside out. We compute solutions with memorized formulae. We imitate the precision of a machine to the best of human ability. Speed, logic and precision are the sought-for characteristics of the modern manager and employee alike.

But now: enter artificial intelligence. Faster-computing. Precision-sure. Pausefree. We now become like an ancient sculptor racing a 3D printer, frantically chiseling away at the resistant rock. Have we doomed ourselves, through our own creation?

An ancient sculptor might not have the speed of a modern machine, but while AI might imitate, recombine and correlate, it cannot create. How to imitate the Classical form before it was brought to life or approximate the Socratic method before its development? How to statistically project Einstein’s discovery of general relativity from the world of Classical mechanics? How to correlate ideas, which first had to be discovered?

Where AI might have encyclopedic knowledge of the past and present, the future is something that only we can create. Here, in the quiet lightning kindling the hypothesis of the scientist, the engineer, the inventor, the Classical artist, we leave all that is digital and logical and deductive behind us. In this domain, we remain the sovereign.

Like the calculator freed the “human computers” of yore, so now, artificial intelligence promises to free us from cumbersome, repetitive chores, from logical thought-trains and endless statistical analyses. It takes over in these fields only to leave us the one that truly matters. The one where we are most human. It thus frees rather than shackles, enriches rather than destroys. Artificial intelligence lets us be who we truly are.