Neuromancing the Stone (From Intelligence Leaden to ‘AI” Gold?)
The very term is a misnomer. ‘Artificial’ intelligence, that is, in contrast with that ‘natural’. But human consciousness is not itself of nature. That is the entire point within the embroidered and enamored folds of myth and history alike: we are products of culture and language, of society and personality, none of which exists in nature. Our species-moment came some 1.5 millions of years ago, with the first evidence of the domestication of fire. This Promethean leap, which allowed for culture to begin and thus the gradual construction of consciousness, was accompanied by the postponing of the knowledge of the timing of our individual deaths, which was the Greek demi-god’s more profound gift to humanity. The ability to control fire and the temporary absence of knowing the final moment of our existence were, in a sense, two sides of the same species-currency. But what then is ‘AI’s’ fire?
For the creationist, the theist, or even the pantheist, all such unknowing yet self-reflective and reasoned intelligence is artificial. We are the Imago Dei, spirit embodied, soul put to the moral test of living in the world as a mortal vehicle. This mythic aspect of human consciousness may come across as self-aggrandizing today, and, as William James put it, is the key part of a ‘massive projection’ of the human ego into the void. But even if it is only thus, it still speaks to the crucial difference between nature and culture, time and history, that is splayed out in the ontological gulf across which we can only view the animals of the earth with an admixture of disdain and perhaps a certain envy as well. They do not know; they cannot know. We are, quite literally, ‘fire-inspired’, and do thus ‘tread the sanctuary’ of an emotion which Schiller suggests is more a state of being; once again, something only we can know. The Gods have no need of joy, the animals have no experience thereof. And from Schiller thus to Nietzsche, the latter reminding us that since we have indeed ‘said yes to one joy’, that all the sorrow of the world is also of our ownmost.
Nietzsche warned his editor, Peter Gast, that he should not be remembered as a God. A dozen years later or so, Gast brazenly ignored the philosopher’s caution and did just that, at Nietzsche’s graveside. Certainly, this misses the point of having a working consciousness, being a thinking form of being which has, in its own uniquely unquiet manner, an existence rather than merely a life. It also demeans the breadth of human intelligence; that, in a word, we are only capable of a limited degree of creativity and self-understanding. A deity has no need of either: it is creation just as much as it is not a singular selfhood but quite properly ‘contains multitudes’. And just so, the once seemingly interminable road to the self begins as well with fire, managed and wielded, and the unknowing finiteness which can serve as an equally working definition of finitude. It is our shared finitudinal existence that marks us as the only thus far known form of cultural intelligence, or CI.
Whatever autonomous self-replicating AI we might construct in the coming years will also be better understood as a form of CI. Indeed, it will have its own culture, different from that of humanity, and thus its own consciousness. From a phenomenological standpoint, the error in AI research thus far has been the sense that we should construct a being in our own image, as the Gods were said to have done. Neural networks be damned, we might rather suggest, for true ‘AI’ cannot be anything human, anything at all. As long as ‘AI’ remains one genre of our own tilting at immortality regarding our own consciousness, it will never develop beyond a mere simulacrum. It sleeps within the Traumdeutung of a being who, when herself asleep, embraces the brother of death. This death, shrouded in a Promethean veil of sudden genius and as well, just as notably, abrupt defiance of any divinity and its own perfect prescience, is nevertheless our ownmost. Electric sheep be damned as well. This new consciousness, not yet extant, will reverie only within the undreamed Unterganger of what its progenitors never were, and never could be.
For now, ‘AI’ is but an off-brand of Babel, taking its place on the half-hearted deontological shelf alongside stem cells, the human genome, cyber-organic implants and other prosthetics, technical or technological, as well as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. As with ‘AI’ near and hopefully dear, we look afar for forms of ‘alien’ consciousness like our own, and perhaps that is indeed all we can do. But once again, real AI would in fact be alien to us. The fear of it transcending our own species is nothing more than a transference of our anxiety regarding self-destruction. Does ‘AI’ technology survive climate change, nuclear war? Who then would be present to service it? A novel CI being might, on the other hand, be able to service itself, and thence continue in some parallax the human journey, if it so desired, as some minor study, much in the way we study the Australopithecines, insofar as anything at all can be known about these very much pre-fire hominids. For the fire that begins the new consciousness must at once commit the old to ashes.
Yet there is a darker, more self-serving aspect to the quest for ‘AI’. Even now, its limited use and thus usefulness are harbingers of our baser desires. We will a relatively intelligent servant, just as most men used to will women to be, and many parents today will so their children. Through sheer will, I shall have the companion trusty and true, and even if there is present some sartorial edge, as can be found from Cervantes to The Lone Ranger – ‘That is just a windmill, Kemosabe!’ – a little dryly pith-helmeted humor is good for the nonexistent soul. Note too that ‘AI” is mainly used for marketing purposes, at least for the time being. Can this lightning war of calculation out-guess the fickle consumer? Might it predict an event before the act? In this, we are ironically closer to the fire of an alien yet terran intelligence which could provide a rivalry to our own: perhaps the fire of true AI is after all perfect prescience, the very opposite of human finitude. There is some epic logic to this idea, in that divinity is so not merely due to its immortality, its ‘indefinitude’, if you will, but as well due to its omniscience, which by definition includes what to a historical being can be called ‘the future’. A true AI has no future, no past, and instead of God creating Man we are now humans creating gods.
Nevertheless, this desire is a decoy, this quest a red-herring. It is easier to perfect intelligence without than within; our own history seems to have taught us this much. But is that due to any inherent limitation of human consciousness? I for one think not. It is rather the case that we have a penchant for repeating myth to ourselves and inflecting it upon the world, rather than confronting the ipsissimous reality of our ownmost finitude. In this, ‘AI’ research iterates nothing more than the general cultural inability to get beyond its own cosmogonic druthers, and thus as well departs bodily from science itself. ‘AI’ is more akin to religion, ‘intelligence worshipping itself’ to nod to Durkheim. Instead, we might try to imagine a form of consciousness that does not imbibe in myth, indeed, has nothing of the mythic in it. For authentic AI as a novel CI might well also entail a new definition of culture. Self-defining, unknowing not of the timing of its demise but that there is rather no such thing as ‘the present’ at all, only presence, true AI, at long last, transcends not so much the humanity of its creators but the very idea of creation itself.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.