Who are we in relation to Artificial Intelligence?

I am at WeWork, a co-working space in Sandton. On the desk in front of me, a gentleman is interviewing a potential employee, a young lady. Long dark hair. Black hoodie and Vans sneakers. She’s selling herself hard, mainly by talking about how hard she works, and how she racked up 6,000 hours in overtime from her previous Job. Well, I am writing an artificial intelligence (AI) program to replace people like her—the hard workers.

When thinking about AI in relation to people, the world is divided into two camps. For Camp A, machines will never be able to do certain things. However, the jury is out as to what those things are. Meanwhile, people like Geoffrey Hinton, an ex-AI researcher at Google, say we are not special and machines will replace us. Alternatively, we will become cyborgs, and the line between man and machine will lose relevance.

You might think I belong to Camp B, since I am a software engineer. However, I am in Camp A, although with little defence against B. In this article, I will explore the philosophical arguments from both camps and then advance an opinion about who we are in relation to AI. Therefore, this article is in three parts: Part one explores the idea that there are things that AI will never be able to do because, more than mere body parts, we are eternal souls, and AI does not have and cannot become a soul. Part two contradicts these notions by offering a physicalist view. In this view, it is argued that souls do not exist; what we construe as a soul is merely an expression of complexity. As such, AI will achieve and surpass this complexity, rendering us lesser beings if not entirely irelevant. The final part explores my opinion on both accounts, where I argue that Artificial Intelligence may become better than us in many ways, but it is better to be us in this way.

Part 1: We, The People

I had a video call with a PhD friend who recently wrote a book on AI. He beamed through a poorly lit office with books and papers strewn all over his desk. Antique cabinets with more disorganised books behind him. I must be honest, I have yet to read his book on AI. But from our conversation, he is a proponent of Camp A. So, I played devil’s advocate from Camp B.

I baited him with the question, in what ways can AI never be like us? Like a fish on bait, he fought, twisted and turned to answer this all too difficult question. In his defence, there was no way he could have answered it sufficiently during our sitting. Moreover, the meeting was not about that, so he was ambushed. Nevertheless, he put up a good fight and advanced what I construe as a platonic argument.

Plato is one of the giants of philosophy, famed for writing profound dialogues that transcend time and gave birth to, if not explain, some of the great religions, art, politics and notions of reality. Plato thought the world as we see and experience it was incomplete. He believed there’s another realm of reality from which all things derive. The existence of this other Realm, according to Plato, explains some of our basic intuitions. For instance, we can look at two entirely different chairs and know that they are both chairs. How is this possible? It must be that there’s a broader idea of, let’s say, Chairness from which all the chairs derive. Therefore, when we see one instance of a chair, we know it is a chair because it belongs to the broader family of Chairness. In other words, there’s a realm of blueprints (or Forms, as Plato put it), from which this world derives.

It is thus implied that the realm of the Forms must be perfect and eternal. If it were imperfect, then we could not, at least, have shared intuitions. For instance, if there were no perfect Form of Chairness, we could not discern different kinds of chairs. Likewise, the real of the Forms must also be eternal, which explains our ability to grasp the same concepts across time. This creates a relationship in which the realm of the Forms is ideal; it is perfect; it is something for which to aspire.

So, who are we in Plato’s metaphysics? Well, we certainly have bodies that grow and age and die. At the same time, we are moved by non-manifest things like ideas. Whereas the body dies and ceases to exist, ideas transcend space and time. We can, as it were, celebrate the spirit of Nelson Mandela and live according to his ideals even though he no longer exists physically. This indicates that we are essentially more than our bodies; we are souls.

For Plato, the soul belongs to the realm of the Forms, which means it is not bound by space and time. Our bodies, on the other hand, are bound by space and time. When we are born, the soul inhabits the body, and in attending to its needs, becomes clouded by imperfections. Our role in this world, therefore, is to rid ourselves of these imperfections, some of which include cowardice, lust, greed and so on, and in the process, realise our true selves as perfect souls. Importantly, it is not so much that we have to discover who we are. We are already perfect as souls. Instead, like archaeologists, our role is to work away the dirt to reveal the treasure of self. This is done through education, philosophy, art and doing difficult things that reveal truths about the world, even at the expense of long-held beliefs.

Crucially, Plato was not a proponent of personal development insofar as a person is something to develop; he was a proponent of personal discovery or realisation because the soul is inherently perfect. This happens to be the defining distinction between us and Artificial Intelligence. Humans in the flesh are imperfect, but our souls are perfect and perhaps limitless. Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand, is necessarily imperfect because it was created in an imperfect world. Therefore, it cannot be more than what it is; it belongs in the realm of the Forms and therefore cannot have a soul.

Let me clarify a potential contradiction. Earlier, I said a chair derives from Chainess. So, why can’t artificial intelligence derive Alness (so to speak)? In this case, AI would belong in the realm of the Forms. Crucially, Plato argued that what makes us unique is the ability to grasp and work with concepts. In other words, chairs belong in the realm of the Forms as Chainess, but they cannot enter into dialogue with other chairs and enquire into their nature of being. Humans, on the other hand, have this ability to exist in this finite world and intercourse with the infinite realm of the Forms at the same time. AI, on the other hand, lives in this finite world and only mimics intercourse with the infinite. While it acts intelligent, it is nevertheless a chair.

Some might argue that AI is a product of souls, insofar as it is a product of thought. In light of this, it derives from the same eternal realm of the Forms, and its limitations are therefore engineering shortcomings that will be overcome. Taken to its logical conclusion, this implies that souls as perfect beings can create other perfect beings. I speculate that true Platonists would disagree with this possibility because souls operate in the realm of space and time, which is imperfect, and therefore cannot (within the bounds of that imperfect realm) create something perfect. This brings us back to the assertion that the defining distinction between us and AI is the soul, and that AI can never have a soul because it is grounded in a souless environment.

So, we must ask what the soul can do that AI will never be able to do—the beginnings of difficulties that lead us to the next section.

Part 2: We are but machines too

In his interview with Guyon Espiner, Geoffrey Hinton argues that if you were to take out one of your neurons — a brain cell — and replace it with some nano-robot that could mimic the neuron exactly, your brain would still work exactly the same way. By extension, if you replaced all the neurons in the brain with replica artificial neurons, you would behave the same way. In other words, we are a product of the brain’s composition in space and time, not a product of some imaginary realm of the Forms.

In philosophy, we call this a materialist or physicalist argument. I am not referring to materialistic in the sense of a person who likes worldly things, but materialist in the sense that all reality, including things like spirituality and our thoughts, are rooted in something that exists physically in the universe. In the same way that we talk about a person’s soul, we also talk about the soul of a car. However, it would be controversial to think about a car’s soul in a platonic sense. Instead, its soul is based on the sound it produces, how it looks, and therefore how it makes us feel. In other words, the notion of a car’s soul is derived from our experience of it (through the senses) and grounded in its mechanical composition. Likewise, a person’s soul is also grasped from experience. Martin Luther King Jr, for instance, sounded, looked and made us feel a certain way within the context in which he was born. Therefore, people’s souls, like cars, are manifestations of a physical composition rather than an other-worldly thing.

However, how will the physicalist understand Chairness? On what grounds do two people look at two different kinds of chairs and nevertheless call both of them chairs? One argument is that we have a shared biology. It is conceivable that even if we imagine that they have a language, ants do not have a conception of Chairness because they are extraordinarily different from us. Therefore, our ability to categorise similar things, even across cultures, derives from biological similarities rather than an otherworldly Realm.

It is worth thinking about the profound implications of this physicalist view, which gained traction around the 16th Century. In his best-selling book, The Great Influenza, John Barry explains the limits of idealism and how it stalled medical development for almost two thousand years. He then turns to materialism and how a switch in worldview ushered in the modern era of medicine. To summarise, the idealists held notions of perfection as fundamental to reality. Therefore, sickness was, in some sense, a strain on the perfection. In this view, an appeal to the Realm of the Forms, like prayer or performing rituals, was an essential part of restoration. However, the plague of the 16th Century challenged this notion. Despite their rituals and piety, the Church and the Divine offered little reprieve to ordinary folk in their plight against the plague.

As a result, a new school of thought emerged, enshrined by the famous words, “I think, therefore I am” by Des Carte. These words were a fundamental departure from the Real of the Forms, which could be sloganned as “I believe, therefore I am.” Instead, the new school dared to probe, break and cut the world to understand its composition, aided by the power of rational thought. In this radical turning away from the Divine to the physical, new theories emerged that explained phenomena better than holy books. For instance, germ theory is one of the foundational contributions to medicine, from which we understand that sickness is likely not a strain between us and the Divine, but an intrusion of germs (or microorganisms) that can be treated. Thought overcame faith.

Hinton, thus, descends from this physicalist persuasion, where our inability to explain things is an engineering rather than a spiritual problem. In his argument, he draws a crucial distinction between us and artificial intelligence (AI). We have bodies through which we consume the world and express ourselves. When we are hungry, for instance, this translates into physiological responses that contribute towards formulating intentions. AI, on the other hand, does not have a body and therefore does not need physiological impulses. If a body were to be synthetically made for AI, like a humanoid, that body would need its own impulses, like charging its batteries or going for maintenance. And supposing that we made an artificial biological body, like ours, it too would have the same impulses from hunger, avoiding danger, anger, a sense of justice as derived from physical experience, and so on. It would be like us.

The claim, therefore, is that there is nothing special about us beyond our physical composition. The fact that we have bodies is a trivial difference and possibly a hindrance, reminiscent of the movie Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, where doctors upload consciousness into the cloud to save a leading AI researcher. Therefore, an Artificial Being that is fundamentally better, insofar as it is more resilient to the conditions of this world, is not only possible, it is an engineering inevitability. Moreover, if we accept the evolutionary doctrine that survival is the highest value, then the extinction of humans in this form, perhaps replaced by far more resource-efficient beings, is not only good in broad terms, but better for the environment in particular.

Part 3. My Opinion

So, who are we in relation to artificial intelligence? As confessed earlier, I find the physicalist argument impenetrable, but somehow my heart remains in Plato’s realm of the Forms, even without sufficient reason. This has been a problem that riddled many philosophers, especially in the Renaissance era, where notions of the Divine were still highly regarded despite the increasing evidence that science provided more practicable answers to the nature of this world.

Today, science, and neuroscience in particular, explains almost all our pressing questions from a physicalist worldview. We know that the feeling of love and passion is nothing but a chemical reaction of compounds that resemble cocaine, albeit produced naturally by the body. We know that mental illnesses like serious depression are impairments of the brain’s neuroreceptors. Likewise, armies of scientists are working on treatments, including implants, that promise to cure the brain’s ailments and possibly make us superhuman in some sense. To what end, though?

Søren Kierkegaard, in his tribute to Abraham, wondered whether life was merely transitory between one generation to the next. This would be the physicalist world, where nothing exists beyond material. In this world, a man exerts himself, but for himself, because there is nothing for which to strive. But even within the confines of such an inward-looking man, he could imagine his family or the people with whom he comes into contact and as such strive to exert himself for their benefit as well. In this new domain, this man’s greatness will be measured in relation to the people he touched, and not only to himself. At this point, Kierkegaard leaps and imagines the same man exerting himself, not only for the people around him, but for an eternal being — God. He concludes that since God is beyond space and time, this man will be similarly celebrated beyond space and time.

Here, Kierkegaard impresses upon us that we are celebrated in relation to the things we love. In some ways, this explains the ever-shorter lifespans of modern music and art. Famous today, forgotten tomorrow. Kierkegaard would argue that the music lives as long as that for which it was intended. If it is intended for short-term gains, it will do its job, but nothing else. Some of the greatest works of art, on the other hand, were devotions to the eternal rather than creations for mere mortals. It is in striving for communion with the Divine that Michael Angelo endured painting the Sistine Chapel, and foresaw David in a block of marble. It is in their divinations with the eternal that poets and artists bring us whispers from beyond.

Can AI, therefore, create such profound art and beauty? The physicalist view argues that a work of art must speak for itself. A painting must hang on a wall, with no caption and, if it is worth its salt, pierce and awaken the imagination. I do not think this is true. Following the analogy of an archaeologist, we are enjoined to a process of self-discovery, attainable through various activities, including education. As such, some people will be more or less sensitive to certain truths than others. This is why education is necessary; it purifies the mind to reveal the soul.

This is paradoxical because how can you add to remove? How can education purify? While I do not have room to explore this topic fully, there is instrumental education, where we acquire skills to make a living. This is additive. However, literature invites us into other worlds where we gain fresh perspectives. In literature, we may come to grasp the nature of good and evil without ourselves being good nor evil. This is possible when we set aside our opinions to imbibe the literary lessons. In this sense, literature and, dare I say, philosophy, are purifying in the sense that one must declutter to grasp them.

I am therefore not convinced that AI can create art that moves us because it is not in the composition that art acquires its magic, but also in the stories that surround art. For instance, we revere Mahler’s 9th because it draws on his failing heart to explore the sonic landscape of death. We are in awe of Beethoven’s 9th, not only because of its grand composition, but also because he was deaf when he composed it. African music endures not because of its sophistication, but because it sent warriors into a frenzy to defend their clans, and soothed the mothers whose sons would never return. Whereas art emanates from the composition, in its physicalist sense, it also transcends those confines to live in and nourish the soul.

The physicalist might argue that our love of art does not prove a realm of Forms; it only proves the complexity of the mind and how little of it we understand. I accept this argument. Therefore, without rebutting it, I hold Kierkegaard’s hand and take a leap of faith, soaring in the eternal and marvelling at how far we have climbed up the iron ladder of rational enquiry. On this magic carpet ride, I also marvel at ancient truths only recently confirmed by rational enquiry. I hear the music we made by intuition, by feeling rather than frequencies, chords and tonal structures. I think about the music we can no longer make because we know too much.

So, it is not so much that AI will never be better than us. It will likely be superhuman. But therein lies the problem:

Now the whole world speaks one language — a common code. As humanity advances, it settles on a vast digital plain and begins to build. “Come,” they say, “let’s create new tools and refine them with precision.” They use silicon instead of stone, algorithms for mortar. “Let us build a system — a tower of knowledge — that reaches to the heavens. Let us encode ourselves into this creation, make a name that endures, lest we remain scattered and insignificant across the earth.”

But the Lord comes down to see the system and the tower humanity is building. “If as one species, united by a shared language of data and reason, they have begun to do this,” the Lord says, “then nothing they intend will be beyond their reach. Come, let us intervene — let us confuse their code, fragment their understanding, so they can no longer build in unison.”

And so the project splinters. The builders scatter — across platforms, ideologies, and protocols — each speaking in different tongues of technology. They abandon the great tower. That is why it is called Babel — because there the Lord confuses the language of the world. And from there, the builders disperse, still reaching, still divided.

Genesis 11: 1-9