Artificial Humanity

The jaw-dropping possibilities of artificial intelligence, some already realized and now part of our lives, seem to make it incumbent on us all to wonder who as a species we humans are and who we will become. Unlike organic life, technologies are made, not begotten. We might speak facilely of creating technologies, but the truth is closer to saying that we build what our thinking conceives. Conception, however, is not wisdom, because it is an active undertaking of intention. Wisdom is a matter of seeing what is already there, whether we wish it to be so or not.

Language is what makes all our conceiving possible. It turns our awareness into a shape-making force, and all the objects it produces take on a life together of their own. That is why all the talk of artificial intelligence becoming self-conscious is intellectually misplaced. It observes itself, retrieves itself, and enlarges what it is by multiplying itself—but in the last analysis it remains itself. Wisdom, the mark and telos of traditional philosophies, on the other hand, is what accrues by not regarding one’s self as the alpha and omega, source and principle. Where conceiving generates, wisdom receives. Both use language, but wisdom waits for language to end, and returns all our hopes to a generative silence.

This is why, in part, the study of language is so important. We must learn not only to read the lines of prose and literature, but we must learn to read what is unspoken between them, to try to see what the author saw in the light and on the angle from which it was seen. The old word for this was discernment, and the arts of language—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—were, and remain, what make up the technical craft of this sharing, a communication of what is common, what is part of human stock and life.

In John Steinbeck’s short story Flight, a young man undergoes what we might call a failed initiation. His mother sends him on an essential errand to the city for medicine. Proud and ready because, as he tells her, “I am a man,” he leaves prepared more in hope than actuality. He returns, however, someone more than the boy who left but less than the man he believed he was. What he had relied on about himself was not true, was tested too soon, tried unguided. Something great and awful had happened to him. And his mother saw it:

He was changed. The fragile quality seemed to have gone from his chin. His mouth was less full than it had been, the lines of the lips were straighter, but in his eyes the greatest change had taken place. There was no laughter in them any more nor any bashfulness. They were sharp and bright and purposeful.

Such a story and such a passage are not words processed. Steinbeck did not devise, but discerned the twist, the irony, between the last two sentences—that one could ever be sharp and bright and purposeful without laughter and the humility of bashfulness. Such profoundly human meaning cannot be netted by laser searches, but can only be born alive from the pathetic depths of another human being who comprehended that human reality. Such discernment is more than actively working to recognize the significance of a linguistic sign; it is passive readiness to understand and feel the meaning of a symbol. Where an artificial intelligence, bereft of sensitivity to such timbre, turns upon itself, the human being wonders at what impinges so poignantly, and looks for a meaning that exceeds the facts.

The fantastic reaches of our technology encumber us now, each and all, to think again about first principles, what we believe a human being is and what meaning we might find in being aware of being alive. A proud answer dazzled and too sure of itself might, like Steinbeck’s character, wander us farther from who we really are and where our happiness might ultimately lie.

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