Artificial Intelligence. It might save us.
We are at the dawning of a new era.
What if Artificial Intelligence isn't a monster? What if AI makes humans more humane?
It isn't crazy-idealistic. It is just hopeful.
Today's Guest Post author looks at AI with more optimism than did yesterday's post. Yesterday's post described intellectual theft. Today, Jane Collins takes stock of the present and suggests that AI, whose "intelligence" comes from synthesizing what humans have learned, will teach us the deeper truth of human knowledge, sometimes embedded in our religions, which is our unity.
Humans are tool-makers. Artificial Intelligence is a tool. Who says tools have to be bad? Schools are a tool. Libraries are a tool. They have improved our lives immeasurably. AI could empower us to be our best selves.
Jane Collins is a college classmate. She interrupted her college years to spend a year in Israel, working on a kibbutz. She lives in Massachusetts and this is her garden. A prior Guest Post depicted her lighting a menorah with her granddaughters. She shares her thoughts and writing at https://alicet4.com.
Guest Post by Jane Collins
Time to Grow Up
Our species has had a wild and crazy adolescence. These days we’re facing the consequences of our irresponsible behavior. We can now see that our bad habits will kill us if we don’t quit. It’s time to grow up.
Can we stop eating too much meat, using too much fuel, buying too much stuff we don’t need? Can we stop using plastic? Can we stop making war?
We have to rethink everything. It’s easy to despair when we look at the work ahead of us. Maybe the civilization we have built is too powerful and its inertia too great, our addictions too ingrained. Maybe people are too greedy and violent to change.
But we are much more than our bad habits. Each of us survives infancy because someone fed us and wiped our little bottoms; such ordinary kindness is the neglected background of our lives. Nearly all of us are capable of caring for others, creating beauty, inventing new ways of doing things. And for the first time in history, we have the tools to take advantage of these assets: the internet and Artificial Intelligence.
In recent years, our culture has focused on our differences. We needed to understand how the spectrums of race, gender, and wealth affect individual lives. We needed to hear more voices than those of rich, straight, White men. With the internet, finally, all of us can speak. AI can tell us what people have already figured out about how to fix things, if we ask it the right questions.
The next stage of evolution is looking at common ground – what we share, how we’re all alike – instead of only at our differences. We can feel this common ground in a movie theater or concert. Everyone in the audience is at one with all the rest, in a way. Our attention has a common focus. Changing our culture means changing what we pay attention to. It’s time to focus on human survival.Our attention is our singular gift, our most valuable asset. We can choose what we look at, what we like, what we buy – in both senses of the word. This is our vote. This is the direction we’re taking the culture, whether or not we want to admit our personal responsibility for it.
Status, wealth, nationality, and religion are things we made up, stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can be hard to admit that we’re really just a bunch of panicky primates trying to figure out how to run the planet before we ruin it.
Our world is changing quickly. We now have the tools we need to organize ourselves for survival. Whether we can manage this or not is an open question. Let’s not give up before we try.