In an interview he gave to “60 Minutes” on CBS, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the rise of artificial intelligence presents new challenges that demand ethical and social solutions. He thus called on philosophers to get involved in developing them instead of leaving it to businessmen and engineers to work on these solutions alone.
Interestingly, an increasing number of scientists and researchers are turning their attention to the implications that artificial intelligence could have on culture. The first person whom I read on this matter is former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is really more a thinker than a politician. Currently 99 years of age (he was born in 1923), Kissinger co-authored the book “The Age of AI and Our Human Future,” with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Professor Daniel Huttenlocher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in late 2021. As the title makes obvious, the book addresses the subject of this article.
Last month, the renowned American intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote an article following the launch of the ChatGPT, an AI language model. Its launch caused quite a stir in both the East and the West, as it could be considered a prototype that gives us an idea of what to expect from artificial intelligence and the breadth of its implications.
Prior to all of this, the American-Spanish thinker Manuel Castells had written about the shifts in our values, social relations, and culture he expected to see in what he called the ‘network society.’ That is, systems of relationships and communication are entirely dependent on the Internet. At the time, he warned that a new world was emerging.
We now realize the immense changes engendered by the broadened use of the Internet. It has transformed culture, business, education, how we see and build our identity, and every other aspect of our lives, including warfare. The post-Internet age only bears a slight resemblance to the world of the twentieth century.
Unlike the alarmists, Chomsky does not believe that artificial intelligence will replace or enslave humans. Even if their capacity for processing data becomes greater than ours, the capacity of machines to generate ideas will never surpass that of humans. Thinking is not an exercise in presenting preconceived answers or answers that could be developed through the data available to us, and that is what machines do.
Thinking begins with rearranging the question and redefining the issue it raises. It could involve creating options that had not been available previously. Machines do not have the capacity to do so. Thus, fearing the obsolescence of the human mind is unjustified. However, Kissinger and his colleagues draw our attention to a somewhat different problem. This is the same problem that the current Google CEO and Castells worry about: Artificial intelligence will change the world, including its markets, schools, and curricula. It will also change how we, the individuals living in this world, build relationships. To compare the changes that are expected with a parallel from the past, we could go back fifty years to 1973 and contemplate how the world and our lives have changed since then. The world will change in equal measure between now and the artificial intelligence age.
The shift engendered by the rise of AI will take millions of people out of the economy. It will also radically change social relations and value systems. Thus, we are talking about a conceptual overhaul in culture and lifestyle, not mere applications. The gravity of the changes expected is what pushed Google CEO Sundar Pichai to call on philosophers and those who work in the humanities to become involved; developing the frameworks of this new era should not be left to the engineers and businessmen alone, and certainly not be left to the politicians alone.
