AI requires more, not less, human intervention, more natural intelligence, not less, more soul and life, as history has proved since the inception of the Industrial Revolution.
Do AIs dream of electric sheep? The flicker of light at the end of the screen, the erratic behavior of a program, and the odd mistakes in an answer suggest that, yes, indeed, AIs have a soul. In fact, everything has a soul. Animists believe that mountains, rivers, winds, and clouds, let alone worms, trees, grass blades, fish, and all types of animals, have a soul. Thus, so do AI and their machines. They have souls. Of course they do, like tables, jackets, pens, banknotes, or buildings and houses, homes that have the deepest soul of all. Still, their souls are quite different from the souls of any common people.
AI and its promised miracles are different from the wonder of a baby. A toddler starts talking by asking questions and an infinite set of “whys.” Then it proceeds by saying “no,” which makes the answer even more complex. These first acts of human intelligence totally escape AI, which doesn’t ask questions, wonder why, or say no. This proves, on the one hand, AI’s total incommensurable stupidity and any toddler’s supreme complexity/intelligence. Or not?
According to philosopher Lorenzo Infantino, who recently passed away, the wisdom of capitalism was believing that the market, i.e., any single buyer and seller in his own field, had more wisdom than a totally coordinated absolute Leviathan. Trusting AI to replace human intelligence and freedom is bound to kill the world as we have known it since the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Nobody can ignore the soul of AI, as we can’t ignore the soul and conscience of a pet dog, a bug, a river, a monument, or the wind. Still, you can’t confuse the different souls with one machine, piece of wood, or a human spirit. Perhaps the biggest risk coming from AI is not just that ‘intelligent’ codes will be implanted on weapons that will fire automatically without human discretion and hesitation before the bloodshed. It is that AI could be used to run our lives, the markets, the norms of social interactions, deciding what behavior is acceptable, what is not, what is plausible, and what is criminal, without the burden of discretionary jurisprudential judgment.
AI should remind us that, right or wrong, they serve men, and each is a library full of questions, preciously devoid of answers, not the other way around. The walking cane props up the man. The cane without the man is just a stick tossed on the ground. It doesn’t mean canes are useless, or any other object, living creature, or natural element shouldn’t be respected. But one must also know the difference.
Those who want to put machines in power want to take power and life away from others, “lesser” men. We are back, on steroids, to the original question of the Industrial Revolution: Will machines take away life from human beings? The radical answer then was harking back to the past: destroy the machines, as the Luddites preached, or trust the machines will deliver us from work, as Marx preached in his third book of Das Kapital. Neither happened, and something very different, far more complicated occurred—and it’s happening now. The machines’ revolution proved the centrality of human beings and nature. Without them, machines make no sense and stop “living.”
The real practical question is, when do we trust and stop trusting the AI? As modern philosopher Pansak Vinyaratn quipped, AI requires us to be more intelligent and wiser than before. We must be philosophers and have philosophical training to use AI with the necessary caution and intelligence. AI, because it has a soul and its soul could be growing with technological advances, wants more wisdom, not less. Preindustrial societies could afford to have only a fraction of the population who could read and write. Postmodern societies need everyone to be fully literate, with a 20-30% university education. AI societies demand mandatory philosophical training, greater human participation in decision-making, greater freedom, and even greater personal responsibility. Those who want to remove men from the algorithm don’t understand history, modernity, or AI.
