“We act blindly, and such is our condition that even the light of knowledge becomes a means of our blindness.”
~ Hans Jonas, Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolutions
Questioning the Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Cultural Flourishing or Human Demise?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the latest phenomenon in technology that is being applied across scientific, medicinal, artistic, commercial, and other business productivity-related areas. It is being heavily supported by major corporations and governments as a crucial and necessary innovation. Its significance is underscored by indicators such as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, being valued at $150 billion almost overnight (1), and companies like Nvidia, claiming to be the “world leader in artificial intelligence computing,” benefitting from an exponential 2700% stock price increase over the past five years (2).
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We do not know AI’s long term impact on the world. Just as the scientific revolution, set in motion by the discovery of the earth moving about the sun, shifted the 16th century worldview and yielded myriad repercussions still reverberating through our current century, we seem at the threshold of another huge paradigm shift in human consciousness. AI will presumably not be the dominant catalyst of this shift. There are clearly other significant influential factors, such as wars across multiple continents, widespread famine, political unrest worldwide, and the now daily-felt impingement, if not outright horrific catastrophes, of the environmental crisis. Yet, if we ultimately, using AI, turn the reigns of our decision making over to intellectual surrogates of our own making—even if they are only assisting and guiding our thought processes along—we must be cautious of their inherent and intrinsic impact. The dazzle and momentum of AI’s multi-level promise, e.g., capitalistic gain, militaristic advantage, scientific supremacy, extended lifetimes, cosmic colonialism, etc., cannot be contained. AI can only be worked with and potentially molded, to yield human and planetary sustainability and good. This seems a leap of faith.
Consideration of this issue leads inherently to the hard problem of consciousness, a vital topic of discussion and great dispute among philosophers of mind. For if there is truly only the physical brain, with consciousness’s phenomenological experiencing and perceiving soon to be explained by neuroscientists’ discoveries of the brain’s intricate functioning; or if consciousness is deemed real, but frosting-like, in the epiphenomenalism of its workings; or if consciousness is found only within the eye of the beholder with that which is held in its gaze incapable of being truly known, then we are left with a trusting of AI as somehow representative of the whole of human intelligence and consciousness. This view allows us, even encourages us, to give ourselves away to it—knowingly or unknowingly.
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It seems important to provide a more holistic worldview that avoids the pitfalls of AI’s scientism lineage, which is inherently reductionistic, sees nature (including humans) as mechanistic, and treats time only in measurable, static, and cinematographical bursts. This lineage also encompasses, as will be discussed, a number of other hidden influences that have led us, somewhat unwittingly, to the current planetary crisis. Alfred North Whitehead’s process ontology is conscious of and opposes these influences, which he believed were or led to misinterpretations of reality. With Whitehead’s process philosophy as ground, this paper’s intention is to explore AI’s usefulness within a larger context, to make clear its inherent limitations, and to suggest guard rails that might help keep us from giving ourselves away to it. Perhaps it is not a question of flourish or demise, but rather some mix or integration of what could be viewed as dipolar potentialities.
(1) Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Tripp Mickle, and Michael J. de la Merced, “OpenAI’s Fund-Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion,” New York Times, September 11, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/technology/openAI-fund-raising-valuation.html?searchResultPosition=38.
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(2) “NVDA,” Yahoo Finance, accessed November 5, 2024, https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/.