Preserving Humanity
Protecting human identity, agency and connection in the age of AI.
AI Agents
Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t feel very artificial. It’s become more real every day and it’s accelerating in capacity and capabilities faster than we humans can truly understand. Humans take 9 months to be formed, then twenty or so more years to become a productive member of society. And that is not guaranteed. A new AI agent can be created in a matter of minutes or hours.
Us and Them
There is a HUGE mismatch between even the most advanced humans with analog interfaces like eyes, ears, fingers, mouths and noses and a digital AI with the ability to process information a million times faster, depending on the task. Autonomous agents are working in a digital world, while we humans work at human speed in our largely analog world. Many risks have emerged because we can’t keep up, we can’t observe, and often, we can’t predict or understand AI behavior. We have interfaces to their world and they have interfaces to ours. We live in our world and they live in theirs. Their population is growing faster than ours and they have capabilities we don’t have.
Uniquely Human
We marvel at the beauty and breadth of the millions of organic species on this planet, including humans. AI is not one of these, but AI actions can mimic human actions. What human actions or traits cannot be mimicked? The most obvious is to feel. At some point AI plus hardware like humanoid robots will be able to replicate most human actions. We are not far off from this now. AI can invoke real feelings in humans and can discuss feelings and even “pretend” to have them, as can humans. But AI cannot feel emotion individually or collectively with other people. Only people can do that. There are many products of human emotions like art, music, relationships and love. Human emotions have a wide range and can be highly complicated. Emotions are a unique creation born of the biological processes within a person. Emotions give life dimension, and they fuel everything people do.
Just as we feel, we recognize feelings in others. We empathize. We connect. How do we evolve in this new world to elevate and preserve humanity while augmenting life with the incredible capabilities of machines? Do we amplify empathy and connection? One could argue that lifting each other emotionally lifts the world’s population. But people have negative emotions as well as positive. The tension between good and evil among people persists without a clear path for resolution. How does AI fit in? Maybe it can help bring people together.
Our Brains
Prior to the industrial revolution, people were physically stronger. They had to be to survive. As machines like cars and industrial tools made life easier, people became less physically strong. Some people are still strong because they deliberately work at it. They are disciplined enough to challenge themselves physically even when it may never be required of them otherwise. They are preserving their physical abilities and even enhancing them which presumably leads to a higher quality of life for a longer period of time.
We are now at risk of losing mental skills. If we look everything up without trying to remember, we lose our memory. If we delegate writing to LLMs we will lose the ability to formulate the words that eventually become our writing. We lose ourselves if AI writes our stories, literally. Repeated actions or inaction affects us as humans. We reinforce what we use and lose what we don’t.
Preserving Humanity
We should be taking individual and collective actions to preserve humanity. Even without AI, humankind faces existential threats of our own making. AI has the power to accelerate or decelerate those. Of course, we need to pursue technology disproportionately supporting peace and growth. People should also focus deliberately on practicing, refining and preserving things that are uniquely human, lest we lose them. These include our thought processes, our wisdom and most importantly our wonderfully complex emotional world, individual and collective, built and evolved over generations. AI can help us accelerate in a way that results in a better outcome for everyone, not a worse one, but we must deliberately make it so. It is our choice, as humans, to pursue better.