The Irreducible Element

Being human in the Age of AI

Technological hype over AI is reaching a frenzy of almost metaphysical proportions. Some people who should know better breathlessly compare it to our discovery and taming of fire. I have been working with AI for a number of months now as it assists my research. I have been introduced to the latest advances in this technology, and recently joined the advisory board of an AI startup. My own evaluation of AI is much more measured, based on what I have seen so far and my understanding of human consciousness.

Among the most intriguing aspects of current generative AI technologies (including large language models or LLMs, such as OpenAI’s GPT) is the fact that their creators do not yet fully understand how they work. The technical mysteries surrounding AI have helped fuel speculation that it will soon develop to the point where it exhibits a kind of superhuman intelligence with its own purposes. I would argue that this is impossible.

The anticipation of sentient machines, often referred to as artificial general intelligence, promises to fulfill a long-held science fiction fantasy of autonomous androids. There is, however, a strong group of credible voices claim AGI is impossible. I am inclined to side with those who hold that authentic consciousness, the kind of self-awareness displayed by HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001 - A Space Odyssey is beyond the capacity of any machine, now and in the future.

There can be no doubt that AI models will continue to get smarter in terms of calculations and the sorting of information. We are yet to discover the limits of what LLMs can do. But it is unlikely that machines will ever acquire a human self-consciousness. An optimistic view is that in our quest to discover what AI can and cannot do, we will expand human understanding of our own evolutionary purpose and the spiritual significance of homo sapiens in the evolution of the universe.

Beginning with the invention of the first labour-saving devices thousands of years ago, we’ve delegated as much work as we can to machines. Indeed this is one of the principal ways we have increased productivity and generated economic growth to the extent that we have. Now with the rise of AI, some seem to think that there may be no end to what we can delegate to machines. I refute that utterly. There is a difference between a machine being able to mimic human qualities like love, empathy, compassion, piety, loyalty, intentionality, intuition, and self-awareness, and actually possess these things. Our mental abilities cannot be reduced to a mechanistic process because they arise from and depend on experience.

Human experience is possibly the most profound phenomenon in the universe. Our experience is really all we can ever know. Machines cannot have experiences in the same sense. AI may acquire knowledge, but it cannot authentically experience that knowledge without grasping the conceptual connection between something (concrete or abstract) and a conscious experience. So as long as AI lacks the ability to have any kind of direct experience, it cannot become conscious in any meaningful sense of that term.

Part of our conscious experience that cannot be fully explained with reference to the physical activity of the brain is what philosophers refer to as qualia—the subjective first person point of view, the sense of what it is like to see or feel something. This existence of qualia is vexing to technologists who label it the “hard problem” of describing how the physical brain generates subjective consciousness. In the field of computational theory (and related reductionistic theories of mind) this is troublesome.

Eventually that will be resolved as we reach the limits of what AI can and cannot do. And at that point we will be able to refute the rather naive theory that psychological phenomena can ever be reduced to a physical process. There’s certainly something about consciousness that we currently don’t understand; but when we do understand it, we will also understand that machines can never be conscious.

While we can identify numerous human talents that arise from and depend on conscious experience, and thus can never be duplicated by unconscious AI, among the most significant is imagination. Imagination is one of humanity’s most meaningful irreducible capabilities because it’s the source for creativity, ingenuity, and cultural evolution.

Humans can almost always imagine how things can be made better, and this is what has allowed us to create our modern civilization. Artificial intelligence can produce novel re-combinations that have never existed before, but these new connections are ultimately bound by what has already been programmed into the machine. In other words they can never be more than appendages, extensions of the will of their programmers. A machine’s design and its programming constrain and define it. When cognition is bound by finite programming, no matter how large the dataset of that programming, it will always lack the degrees of freedom necessary for authentic imagination.

Predictions of the coming “singularity” when conscious AI exceeds that of humans is nonsense to anyone who understands that human sentience is more than just a complex physical technology. Humans are special living creatures. This is why the emergence of the endlessly imaginative abilities of human purpose creates a new kind of evolution—the psychosocial domain of development - wherein we transcend our biological origins through cultural evolution to create a society of mind or noosphere.

I do not doubt that AI will demonstrate its own emergent capacities, like those seen in other complex adaptive physical systems, like the weather for example. But physical forms of emergence such as these will not mean that AI has become alive, let alone sentiently aware of itself. What the science of evolution reveals about the origins of mind begins to show how the notion that we can reproduce the emergence of mind through complex computation is a science fiction fantasy.

The limits of large language models are already becoming evident. In spite of models that can generate their own training data to improve themselves, others that fact-check their own answers, and “sparse expert” models that provide increased computing efficiency, LLMs are still inherently unreliable, prone to giving inaccurate answers known as hallucinations. The research strategy that gave rise to the genesis of ChatGPT is already exhausted and have reached a developmental plateau. Future strides in artificial intelligence will require new ideas.

Even though there are good reasons to believe that AI won’t become conscious, the rise of AI still poses significant risks. The threats have not gone away. The danger is not that the functions of our machines might become more like us, but rather that we might be progressively reduced to functions in a machine.

As we come to realise that machines are unable to become conscious or independently intentional, we will begin to better appreciate that the free will we all take for granted is also an important part of what makes humans special.

By showing how the capacity for self-aware agency is an evolutionary achievement unique to humans, the rise of AI can also help us better appreciate how our ability to create authentic expressions of goodness, truth, and beauty is also exceptional.

While AI can certainly create novel outputs that we humans find intrinsically valuable, these outputs can only be synthetic recombinations of the existing inputs that humans have already created. This is explains the outcry from writers and artists accusing AI of nothing more than mass plagiarism.

The skill to create fresh and truly original forms of value - creations that surpass the mashed-up simulacra of smart machines - ultimately depends on the capacity to directly experience such value. For example, the ability to make moral decisions, by definition, requires self-aware agency, which again stems from our ability to have experiences. If we have no choice, then a decision cannot be said to be an authentically moral choice. Beauty likewise depends on consciousness for both its experience and original creation. Subjective feeling is an irreducible aspect of both aesthetic perception and genuine artistic achievement.

By revealing how and why humans are special, another spiritually significant dividend provided by the rise of AI will be the philosophical rehabilitation of humanity’s unique moral standing in the universe. We have done well to reject traditional forms of anthropocentrism, which have been used to justify the abuse of animals and the destruction of the natural environment. But the rise of AI can help us embrace a more enlightened form of human uniqueness - one which better recognizes our moral obligation to respect, preserve and steward nature, and to better cherish and care for each other.

This is the worldview of ecority – an ontological leap of evolutionary consciousness that helps clarify and illuminate our higher creative purpose.

By evolving into self-awareness, humans provide a way for the universe to experience itself. Our bodies and minds are both the product of evolution, and the means whereby evolution can extend itself further through the seemingly unlimited potentials of human personal and cultural growth. 

Humanity’s uniquely creative powers reveal our special role as agents of evolution - we are the bearers of the universe’s teleology. And as we work to bring more integrity, virtue, truth, and beauty into the world, we help fulfill the purpose of evolution overall.

Ultimately we can rediscover an authentically transcendent form of higher purpose for humanity in the ongoing project of working for a better future - both externally and internally. A future that works for everyone. And a future that works as well for the more-than-human world.