AI and Us
This is a reprint of a 2020 series of 3 linkedIn posts
AI and Us : Why we are afraid
It is rather impossible today to avoid Artificial Intelligence (AI) mentions in any startup-related news. This is the new Holy Grail, the crown jewel of the hype cycle that the high-tech industry seems to have adopted as its very heartbeat.
But this time like never before, a palpable anguish accompanies the usual excitement. Between the plausible prospect of mass job destruction in services, the suspected morbid fantasies of war machines mulled by military industries, and the fear of ending up with a Frankenstein’s creature wanting to eradicate mankind ; it seems that this time we see technology as a menace foremost.
Yet, if all these fears have cause to be, all have reasonable if not conclusive answers. The case is not cracked, but if you want to defend AI you definitely can. We could debate publicly the issue, but we don’t. Is that rational ?
Plus, there is a very strong cultural bias on this question : Europeans are the most pessimistic, Americans are both excited and worried, while Asians (Chinese and Japanese alike) seem to have no qualms about thinking machines.
The explanation I would propose is that our fear is not that AI will become too human and compete with us – we already defeated Skynet, I have seen the movie. Our fear is to discover ourselves as being carbon-based thinking machines with a bad case of free-will delusion. The possibility of free will is absolutely necessary to western civilization as all its institutions (justice, politics, economics, science…) are based on it, so that is an existential threat that no other technology ever posed since the nuke.
But it doesn’t have to be, because intelligence has only been very recently defined as the ability to solve so-called complex problems, which we increasingly strive to formulate in numerical terms, at which the machines are more powerful than we. So we framed the question of intelligence in a certain way where numbers play a huge role ; while retaining a link to free will that does not arise from that definition.
The link between intelligence and free will arose from the classical definition of intelligence: for a very long time, our civilization considered that intelligence was reason and reason was language – the Greek Logos. I propose to investigate whether this traditional view holds any merit in this age, and if so if AI would appear more complementary and less threatening under it.
At this point you should wonder whether I am merely reframing the question of intelligence into a specialty where machines have yet to prove their superiority. Because I am wondering myself.
AI and Us : Intelligence is language
So I made the hypothesis that our angst of AI is artificially fueled by a skewed definition of intelligence, and that we should at least reconsider whether the traditional notion of reason as natural language – and not computation procedure – could still hold today.
Of course it is somewhat a precarious and even foolish enterprise when, like I do, you consider mathematics to be the language of nature. But I am not going to discuss the structure of language or pretend that some inner property of it would make it out of reach of representation by any mathematical model. Indeed I do think there is one that we have not found yet.
Instead I simply want to point out that such a mathematical model of the sentence structure is not enough to describe what language is. Currently every language model only represents the signal – and not the needed context for language. You do not speak to your shoes unless you have a compulsive obsession disorder – and even then you are the audience. We keep saying “natural language”, but we do not study it like a natural object – what are conditions of possibility, how did it appear ?
Articulated sounds before articulated thought
For a start, actual language implies meaning, which demands an alter ego – some being distinct from me in its identity (for communication to be necessary) but identical in structure (for communication to be possible). Social human groups existed before the language developed, and we can imagine that communication codes would rather quickly identify with the group itself.
And we can assume that any amount of added cooperation would be a tremendous advantage in terms of survival of the group at the dawn of humanity. Sure you can hunt without a language, build a hive or nest, mate and take care of the young. All these – rather complex – problems can be solved by animals with brains the size of a peanut. This is instinct. But to keep fire alive, or start hunting mammoths – things human had no previous instinct for -, language seems to be a much credible factor of behavioral adaptation than random or even directed DNA mutations.
So let us take that as a plausible cause : language development is an evolutionary advantage that brings cumulative added benefits with each new complexity level it reaches. Once again the social group is a strong candidate for leveraging a small individual capacity . The group benefits from any communication capacity long before the individual, as we can see in the alert patterns of birds. Intelligence – in the sense of reason and self-consciousness – may have begun as a pattern of collective behaviors being gradually internalized by memorization. Language would then be the matrix of reasoning and self-consciousness as much as its vehicle.
The conscious brain and the autopilot
All of it sounds wildly hypothetical, yet neuro-psychology research actually tends to confirm the central role of language in cognitive processes. It has convincingly shown that the two brain hemispheres have very different cognitive roles – the right brain deals with visual form recognition, threat & general stress response, reflexes and/or learned responses, and short term memorization ; while the left brain works in verbal, secure situations, is slower by a factor 4 on similar cognitive tasks, and is the primary agent of long-term memory.
We can actually speak without thinking, because many processes are automated with sheer repetition, and thus become available for reflex/distracted responses : “I didn’t mean it” is actually a valid excuse for many blunders. And it is literally true : to mean something, one must be conscious of what he is saying while saying it – not later. The right brain can lead you to output a sentence out of habit, automatically. And that has only the appearance of language, because there is no more meaning attached to the sentence than if a parrot was repeating it.
“I” is in this regard the most important word in the language, because it is really the word of self-consciousness : no one can mean “I” without being conscious that they are saying “I”, and of its meaning : themselves. And in general, the structure of language must answer for the relationship between a sentence and the context in which it is said. It does not mean that we cannot one day have a “smart” search engine that will find answers to the meaning of our query rather than its content. It does mean that in such case “smart’ will not equate to “self-conscious”.
Machines can emulate humans inasmuch as humans emulate machines
Let us come back to comparing this approach of intelligence as language, with Deep Blue beating Kasparov in a chess series. Deep Blue, with all its power, is closer to a pocket calculator than to a human being wrt. the meaning capacity. It shows you not only how far current AI techniques are from emulating the human mind, but also how hopeless are the current efforts – if indeed they were aimed at it. If you do not feel threatened by your phone being better than you at calculating a square root, then you should not feel threatened by AI on an ontological basis.
We will have machines capable of emulating humans, not doubt, in everything where humans are actually emulating machines. Every time we draw our response from an array of predefined possibilities, to be chosen according to parameters, we are taking the job of machines. And in time they will take it back. These cases are just much more prevalent than we previously thought : all procedures for instance – be they legal or medical – fall under that category.
And there lies the last sting : even if we are self-conscious and machines are not, what is our meaning if they can do everything we can do ? If, for any given job there is 80% or 90% that can be automated with AI, how are we going to thrive on the 10% remaining ? We are digressing toward the impact of AI here, but let us answer that also, because it may be fine to not being ontologically threatened , if we all loose our jobs it will not make that much of a difference.
First it may be a blessing actually : if 90% of legal cases can be solved with AI, you may have legal insurance contracts for $10 / month, and same deal for health coverage. Humans would concentrate on outlier cases. Surgeons that never sleep, drink, or snap at nurses, will charge you $20 for a 4h procedure. I really think we need to have some optimistic dreamers provide us with an alternate, not dystopian, view of the future, just to balance out the current gloom.
Secondly however, this may also be the time for us to make a conscious effort at becoming more human rather than trying to emulate machines. How we can develop authentically human intelligence will be the third part of this journey.
AI and Us : Develop Natural Intelligence
So I tried to show how AI, with all its power at executing the most complex procedures, need not be seen as mainly a threat ; however to take advantage of its beneficial potential we probably need to foster our own human, natural intelligence.
Studying how language can help us to develop our cognitive abilities will make us also re-discover what is intelligence. Because just saying that it is Logos lacks in precision and usefulness - although it sounds very cool in social gatherings.
Fairy tales
The most ancient form of knwoledge is probably the tale, and it has very probably molded not only our institutions and customs, but our thinking functions, maybe our very physiology. There is a powerful anecdote on that matter, which comes in several flavors, as actual tales do…
There is something incredible here, and that is that Einstein was not making fun of an overly concerned mother, or showing the unconventional streak that was an integral part of his character. There is plenty of evidence that what he said is just literally true, or more precisely that stories are the building block of complex reasoning, as they allow us to associate and recall complex sets of information.
The first evidence resides in long-term memorization techniques, that convert conventions to short stories, so as to avoid the short-term memory trap. For instance, the spanish word for to sit is sentar. To remember that effortlessly for all your life, you only need to tell yourself that “Centaurs do not sit“. It will instantly catch your imagination, and recovering sentar from centaur comes very easily. If on the other hand you learn the pair (sentar, to sit) without a unifying meaning, then you will have a hard time remembering it without repeating the association several times.
Why do we long-term remember stories ? Because the long-term memory is operated by the left brain, as is language. Once could even argue that stories are the very form of long-term memories. And of course we have other stories than fairy tales : everything with a unifying meaning is a story. The lesson is, that we can remember things with great accuracy and resilience if we make them into a story and we tell the story – either by writing or before an audience.
Conscious perception
The fullest set of evidence is related to conscious perception. Consciousness indeed plays a huge role in fine-grained perceptions, and is primarily the transformation of perceptions into a story – with the object being perceived as the unifying meaning. I am aware that it is a bold claim, but I support it with a proposal of experience that everybody can try for himself
We usually refer to this phenomenon as conscience expansion. What happens is that perception levels are raised when informed by language. The experience is impressive because it is surprising, but also because it says a harsh truth : a significant part of our interactions with the world is unconscious, so we cruise it mostly on autopilot. Of course unconscious here is not to be taken in the Freudian sense - it refers to things we do automatically, and some prefer to say pre-conscious.
Say it out loud
And we have proof that the same principles apply to intellectual processes, including learning. An efficient remedy to a number of school difficulties consists in making the pupil execute the tasks consciously rather than automatically - precisely by making him say out loud what he is doing or wirting. Results are sometimes spectular: from F to A in a dictation for instance. The hardest part is to convince the kids to do it, because they often have been taught to work quickly and silently, and view talking while working as a sign of regression to an infantile phase of learning, thus depriving themselves of the best part of their intelligence.
The good news is, there is no fate here : at almost any age some months or even even weeks are enough to modify brain circuits to make a process conscious. And to help our teenagers to overcome their reluctance, we can apply this method on ourselves - with benefits. Otherwise, asking how and why on elements of their lessons is the simplest way to orient their mind towards the meaning of what they say.
To know is to love
This more conscious perception of things and knowledge also has a critical impact: it makes us love them. Indeed, the more the perceived elements are put in relation with others stemming from memory, the more they become familiar. As an old pull-over, a worn book or a childhood house, meeting them give us the happiness of feeling home.
It is well-known for things that we exeperience directly, and people will talk to their cat, their flowers and their clothes (if you are Japanese). Even a number can acquire this familiarity and almost an identity when all its dividers, multiples, complements and powers, all the numbers to which it is related, are evoked with it when it is called to our attention.
This is critical because if familiarity is caused by learning, then it is no longer possible to oppose success in school and the happiness of the pupil. Well-being and familiarity are thightly interwoven, just as are stress and uncertainty - and this is very well documented : the left brain become predominant in known situations, and produces relaxing hormones. This is why children ask for a story before sleeping: hearing the story activates the language cerebral regions, which happen to be in the left hemisphere, and its activity signals that we are safe.
Conclusion
The crisis stemming from the rise of Artificial Intelligence as a labor technique is also an opportunity to think about what makes us human, and to decide to reinforce it.
If we manage to develop our intelligence of the world, we will be happier living in it, and we will become more apt to make personal and collective choices that benefit humanity. This include the place we allow machines to take. Indeed the first result of the development of Natural Intelligence could be to change our view of our digital creatures so as to no longer fear them:
Objets inanimés, avez-vous vous donc une âme
qui s'attache à notre âme
et la force d'aimer ?
(Lamartine)
Inanimate objects, do you indeed have a soul
attached to our soul,
and forcing it to love?
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