Recently a member of my book club
sent around, to me and the other members, an excerpt from a poem by Henry David
Thoreau which he found particularly moving.
It read:
I
witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the clouds which addresses itself
to my imagination... You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other
rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing, for this red vision excites me,
stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow... If there is not something mystical in
your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements
of mystery, it is quite insufficient.
Among the expressions of approval and admiration from the
other members, one of these included an intriguing question:
After
reading the above, would you be able to say unequivocally, that a human wrote
it? If not, how would an AI [artificial intelligence] be able to
generate that text? And if it generates the text, does it possess the
sentiment? How do you know?
And this prompted another member to write:
Thoreau's
words resonate with a profound appreciation for the beauty and mystery inherent
in nature. His ability to see beyond the scientific explanation of the clouds'
formation and delve into the emotional and mystical impact of their appearance
reveals a deep connection between the external world and the inner realm of
imagination. In a world often dominated by scientific explanations, he
reminds us of the importance of embracing the mystical and unexplainable
elements that contribute to the richness of our experiences with nature.
But he quickly added that these remarks actually were generated
by an artificial intelligence application (ChatGPT) that he had “asked” to
express its opinions on that poem by Thoreau.
In reply, the other member who had posed the question said that this
computer-generated response was something that she could have easily
predicted. I must confess that I was apparently
much more impressed by this appraisal than she was, and could have been easily
fooled by it, had the other member not confessed immediately to his deception.
This is just one example of how AI is and will increasingly
be encroaching upon domains that were once considered to be exclusive to human
beings. Last April, an AI facsimile of
the late comedian George Carlin was featured in a podcast titled “George
Carlin: I’m glad I’m dead”. The podcast
featured AI-generated jokes in the style of Carlin’s comedy, done in a voice
that sounded like his. It was eventually
removed after the Carlin estate filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the podcast
had violated his estate’s copyright protections.
Comedy, of course, is an art form, and requires a nuanced
understanding of what people find humorous, and what makes them laugh. And on top of this, it is a very fickle art
form, in that what is funny to some may be completely unfunny to others – even
offensive and unpleasant. As Louis
Armstrong once said about music, “If it sounds good, it is good,” so too the
test of genuinely good comedy is if people find it funny. Is it really then possible for a computer to
create comedy . . . to be funny? On
first blush it sounds absurd, but perhaps it actually is possible to use an
analytic approach in order to distill the elements that make certain styles of
comedy funny to certain audiences.
George Carlin’s style might even have been particularly amenable to this
approach, since his comedy relied heavily upon wordplay. And if it can be done for comedy, it doesn’t
seem to be that much of a great leap to imagine computer-generated music, or
visual art. In fact, it is already being
done. Last March, an application called
Suno, nicknamed “ChatGPT for music”, was launched, which can produce original
music in response to textual prompts.
This was followed a few weeks later by a similar application named
“Udio”. And the Turkish-born artist
Refik Anadol featured a successful exhibition in London this year that
consisted of AI-generated images of natural landscapes.
In a blog entry that I posted more than ten years ago, “The
New World Order?” (https://johnsemeraldtablet.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-new-world-order-in-my-occupation-as.html), I noted that as
machines take on an increasing role in producing all of the necessaries of
life, including food, it will become more and more challenging for human beings
to find ways in which they can exchange things of value for what they need and
desire. I wrote:
In some
ways, this actually does seem to be the trajectory that we are
on. In America, the proportion of manufacturing jobs has been
steadily declining, while that of service jobs has increased, and a third type
of employment, in which persons are compensated for thinking (e.g., as
executives, consultants, accountants, engineers, and other professionals), has
rapidly grown. We seem to be moving toward a two-tiered society, in
which “cognitive” employment and more skilled service jobs are well compensated
(although, as satirized in movies such as Office Space, even these
jobs can devolve into degrading, poorly paid lackey positions), while
lower-level service and unskilled manufacturing jobs receive very meager
wages. And of course, our most successful entertainers – including
professional athletes – are extremely well paid. Another form of
“entertainer”, the drug dealer, has become a prominent figure in the underclass
and the underground economy (and those who control the production of these
drugs are often at the heads of powerful private empires in foreign countries),
while the less successful members of this group make up the huge prison
population that is now a part of the American social system. Other
less successful and less powerful “entertainers”, such as strippers and
prostitutes, lead lives that are only at one or two removes from those of
prisoners and the destitute.
At that time, concerns about AI had not yet entered the
general public conversation, and since then, intelligent machines have
conspicuously moved beyond the manufacturing sector and have made strong
inroads into the service sector as well.
But even beyond this, recent advances in AI have made it very plausible
that jobs in the “cognitive” employment area could be taken over by machines as
well. And if this includes art and
entertainment, then it really is becoming increasingly plausible that there
will be little left of value that individual human beings can offer in return
for the compensation that will allow them to procure the things that they want
and need. Even if some kind of
technocratic socialism evolves where human beings do not have work to obtain
the things that are produced by machines, this could still result in a very
dystopian utopia, not unlike that featured in the 2008 animated feature film Wall-E,
where overweight people spend their entire days sitting in comfortable recliner
chairs, drinking soda pop in large cups while being entertained by video
screens comfortably placed directly in front of them.
But setting this dismal scenario aside, there is a more
depressing, fundamental question: If
computers will eventually be able to do just about everything that we can do,
including producing works of art and entertainment – even if they can only
produce effective simulations or imitations of these – then what, exactly, is
it of fundamental value that human beings have brought to the universe as a
result of their existence? Will the
final culmination of our civilization be the creation of lifeless machines that
make our own existence superfluous, meaningless, . . . even unnecessary? If our physical evolution and the consequent
evolution of our civilization represent a sort of culmination of life on earth,
then what did we evolve into? What,
then, does the word “evolution” even mean?
The theory of evolution, although considered a foundational
element of biological science, has not been without controversy – even setting
aside those perennial attacks raised by proponents of Creationism and “Intelligent
Design” – as both the mechanisms and drivers have been debated and
critiqued. One fundamental criticism –
raised, for example, in Norman Macbeth’s 1971 book Darwin Retried – is that
the phrase often associated with Darwinism, “survival of the fittest” (which
was actually coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, but with Darwin’s
approval), is a meaningless tautology since, after all, the “fittest” by
definition are those that survive. I
find this particular criticism to be rather lame, because one could argue, for
example, that the phrase “those who are successful in their profession get
promoted” is hollow on the grounds that the “professionally successful” are by
definition those who get promoted. Just
as there are specific, identifiable, talents and behaviors that contribute to “professional
success”, so too in biological ecosystems those organisms within a species that
possess certain characteristics which better enable them to live long enough to
reproduce are “more fit” for survival in a very meaningful sense of the word. Nevertheless, while successful adaptation of
species to their environments seems to be a critical component of the
evolutionary process, I don’t think that this fully embodies the concept of
“evolution” as it is generally understood, by both the scientific and the
general community. There is more to
evolution than just developing the ability to thrive in one’s particular
surroundings.
The evolutionary process involves an increase in complexity:
a counter movement to the increase in entropy or disorder that comes about as a
result of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
“Complexity”, however, is a term that defies simple definition, and has
inspired a whole science of its own.
What does it mean for something to become more complex? An evolving ecosystem seems to become more
diverse, and yet more interconnected. In
a seminal article published in 1962, “The Architecture of Complexity” (Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106, No. 6, December, 1962),
Herbert Simon contended that “complexity frequently takes the form of
hierarchy”, with systems that can be decomposed into interdependent
subsystems. I think that the 20th-Century
psychologist Kurt Lewin best applied a model like this to living entities in
his theory of personality. Personhood,
he believed, entailed a two-step process which begins with a separation between
self and non-self, a property that he referred to as “differentiation”. The second step of this process is inclusion
of the self into a larger environment or totality, in what he referred to as a
“part-whole” relationship. When looked
at from a broader ecological perspective, this two-step process of
differentiation and integration is evident at all levels of life and in every
phase of evolution. Single-celled
organisms exist because of self-constructed barriers between themselves and
their environment, and yet to survive they have to interact with that environment,
taking in necessary elements for sustenance, competing with other organisms,
and perhaps avoiding predatory organisms as well. Increased complexity is evident when cells
are no longer autonomous entities, but instead are components of larger,
multicellular organisms – hierarchies like those described by Herbert Simon. And from the simplest unicellular organisms
to the largest multicellular ones, webs of interconnected relationships
continue to emerge and expand: cooperative, competitive, combative,
parasitical, and predatory.
Kurt Lewin's Field Theory of Personality
I have remarked elsewhere that an interesting characteristic
of all living beings with organs of perception, and certainly those that
possess some form of consciousness, is that they tend to exclude at least as
much as they take in. This is in part
due to simple physical limitations of course: we can only see so far, and can
only discern sounds to a certain level of softness. But other exclusions and limitations seem to
have been intentionally “hard-wired” into living beings, such as the limited
range of light and sound frequencies that they can perceive. These limitations make the surrounding
environment more “manageable” to the various creatures that live within it,
providing them with just enough information to sustain themselves, to avoid
predation, and to propagate, without being overwhelmed by sensory input. Even the function of memory exhibits this
tendency to selectivity, so that the present awareness is not cripplingly
clouded by a torrent of images, sounds, and feelings from past experiences.
And yet, even among the simplest unicellular organisms, and
certainly among the higher ones, there is a countervailing impulse to expand
this limited cone of awareness, beginning with the act of movement –
self-directed, or brought about through some other means. The expansion becomes more effective through
communication, beginning with the simple recognition that there are other
living entities identical to or at least similar to oneself. The successful actions of these others may at
first only be observed and mimicked, but at some phase of evolution,
information is actively shared, resulting in coordination of activities to
serve a common end, and access to a wider pool of knowledge that one can use to
specifically serve one’s own purposes.
The means of sharing information become more sophisticated among higher
species, culminating in the verbal exchanges of human beings and, beyond this,
their writing. As a result of scientific
advancement, we human beings have also found other ways to expand our cones of
awareness, through microscopes, telescopes, and even reading glasses and
hearing aids. Among the most social
organisms, Simon’s hierarchies are very much in evidence, whether they are
simple dominance hierarchies, or highly coordinated activities, as seen among
ants and bees, for example. Hierarchies are
the hallmark of human civilization, manifesting in our political organizations,
our large private corporations, and even in the way that we structure our
general knowledge and information.
Hierarchy, in fact, is a hallmark of life, present across the entire
spectrum of species. Cells that make up
larger organisms do not have the free-ranging existence of one-celled
creatures, but in return for this loss of freedom they are sustained and
protected by the organism of which they are a part. At the other end of the spectrum we human
beings voluntarily and regularly give up parts of our autonomy to our political
institutions, our workplaces, and our religious organizations because we
believe that by doing so this enriches our individual existences. We may not be cells rigidly connected to a
larger body, but we are all parts, in various ways and to various degrees, of
larger wholes.
Is this, then, the culmination of the evolutionary process: perfecting
the art of sharing, collecting, and coordinating information so that we can
maximize, in a pragmatic sort of way, our individual and collective cones of
awareness? If so, then it is very easy
to imagine that intelligent machines could represent the ultimate culmination
of this process: organizing, coordinating, and disseminating information in the
most efficient way possible, and perhaps
even guiding and managing our activities in a way that we believe best serves
our ends. Constitutions and legal codes
might even be replaced by systems of social regulation guided by computer
programs. Intelligent machines may
logically end up, then, at the apex of the various organizing hierarchies that
will bring this model to its greatest fruition.
In the most utopian and benign form of this vision (and science fiction
has provided us with an abundance of scenarios where it could go terribly
wrong), it is – at least in some ways – an exhilarating one. And yet even if this best case represents our
future and the culmination of civilization – of evolution itself – there is
something about it that seems ultimately hollow, empty.
A Wildflower Meadow: Paradise or Ecological Battleground?
Is it our emotions, then, that breathe life into
evolution? This is certainly the
fundamental thing that sets us – and all animal life – apart from machines, and
probably always will. Have emotions
reached a peak of refinement and intensity in human beings, after evolving from
the simple anger/fear fight-or-flight emotions of the lower animals? Even in Darwin’s day, there was a realization
that there is a strange paradox underlying evolution, in that behind the image
of a beautiful garden meadow, for example, there is a life-and-death struggle
involving competition, conflict, and predation among its denizens. Fear, anger, and selfish desire are just as
much fundamental elements of the life process as love and compassion. Have these latter, more benign, emotions
become more prominent with the progression of higher life forms? They are not unique to human beings of
course. Some species of animals, in
addition to being capable of harboring feelings of compassion and affection
beyond those required for parental care, even seem to possess their own forms
of a sense of humor, and many species have even shown an appreciation for
music. But if the bloody history of
human civilization is a representative guide of the life process at its most
elevated level, then we must admit that the dark and sordid emotional elements
must and do continue to exist right alongside the lighter, more benevolent
ones. If it is not then in emotional
refinement where we can hope to find the “soul” of evolution, like that which
stirred Emerson’s appreciation of that mystical element of beauty in natural
things, and which he said must always defy logical description (even that made
possible by artificial intelligence), then where else can we turn?
Perhaps the soul of evolution lies in the act of creation,
of shaping and organizing the environment as the result of an intentional act
of will: marking territory, building nests, making tools, cultivating
agriculture, constructing buildings, making music, making art, inventing
machines. Creation is at the very core
of consciousness, shaping both our external and internal environments. Even that limited, filtered stream of
perceptions that organisms allow into their consciousness comprise a cacophony
of impressions that must be actively ordered into an internal recreation of at
least a facsimile of the surrounding environment, and, as the philosopher
Immanuel Kant suggested, what we create internally might not entirely
correspond with what’s actually out there, around us. We might already be introducing a little
fiction – not just into our present awareness, but also into the growing flood
of memories that we are similarly screening and ordering, so that they link our
pasts and presents in ways that form coherent life histories.
The philosopher Henri Bergson saw evolution as a
progressive, creative act, and his book, Creative Evolution, inspired
the title of this present article. But
in that book, he warned that creation – true creation – is incompatible with
some of our common conceptions of how the universe works. For example, if we truly live in a universe
where cause-and-effect rules, then in it, “creation” becomes a meaningless
concept. If every invention, every
writing, every work of art has come about as the result of an inevitable chain
of causes, then no matter how novel or innovative these various productions may
appear, they were not the result of creative acts. In theory, at least, they could have all been
foreseen by tracing out, from any time before they appeared, the chain of
events that would inevitably lead to them.
This would not be evolutionary complexity brought out by living, genuine
creativity, but instead the complexity of a very elaborate wind-up toy.
Henri Bergson
Similarly, Bergson argued that if there is some specific
“end state” that represents the culmination of evolution, be it a particular
form of intelligence, or type of organization, or capacities for perception,
communication, or action, then this, too, undercuts the idea of evolution as a
creative process. He likens that end
state to a jigsaw puzzle: As species –
and then civilizations – advance, they move farther along in completing that
ultimate puzzle, and reaching the perfect end state. Some may collapse before succeeding, and some
may only succeed in piecing together parts of the puzzle. At least in principle, however, some species,
some civilization, may someday reach that ultimate solution: the one that
corresponds to the pinnacle of evolution.
But in spite of the diversity of the various approaches, and relative
degrees of success, in reaching this end state, perhaps played out by multiple
species and multiple civilizations on many worlds over millions of years, the
blunt fact is that the single end state always existed, at least as a potential
for realization. And if there is a
unique and specific end to evolution, then ultimately the evolutionary process,
while perhaps characterized by a multitude of radically different paths, is not
a creative one. Like the inventions
inevitably “created” as the result of causal chains, and so not really
“inventions” at all, the jigsaw puzzle that defined the culmination of
evolution was always there, waiting to be completed, even if it could never be
completely seen or comprehended by those who were on the path to completing
it. A genuine work of creation, then, is
a novelty: unpredictable right up to the point where it finally comes into
existence, and therefore creative evolution is a process that defies causality,
and has no pre-determined end. In
Bergson’s own words: “Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution .
. . transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an
idea conceived or conceivable in advance.”
What exactly are we doing when we engage in a genuinely
creative act? At the very least, we are
effecting an intentional break in the causal chain of our existence. The idea that the universe is not limited to
unbroken chains of causality has actually become popular among scientists,
particularly quantum physicists, who assert that there is a randomness to the
most fundamental processes of our universe that cannot be removed by better
methods of observation and detection.
Unfortunately, this idea has been pounced upon as a justification for
belief in free will. “Loose play” (a
phrase originally coined by the 19th-Century philosopher William
James) in sequences of thoughts and events, it is contended, might provide just
that space needed for true freedom of action, unconstrained by prior conditions
and conditioning. This is an empty
argument for free will, however. Imagine
a driver (or, for that matter, a driverless car, following a computer program)
that has been directed to follow a particular route. But while the initial set of left- or
right-turns have been explicitly specified in the instructions, at some point,
the driver is instructed to make a turn based upon some method of random
selection, like a coin toss (e.g., left-turn for “heads”, right-turn for
“tails”). Has this introduced an element
of “free will” into the trip? Hardly, since
in spite of the randomness introduced into the outcome – the final destination
– the driver is still following directions, and is not exercising any form of
personal choice into the navigational decisions. If we are to believe in free will, we won’t
be able to find justification for it in the randomness postulated by modern
physics. If God is “playing dice” (as
Einstein put it) with the universe, then God may be playing dice with our minds
as well, but this won’t make us self-directed, autonomous agents: we would simply
be living beings that are ultimately unpredictable, even to ourselves.
"Blue Poles" (aka "Number 11, 1952") by Jackson Pollack
Assuming, then, that we are truly free, how do we create,
and how do these acts of creation lead to evolution, in the open-ended way that
Bergson envisioned it? At its most
basic, we create by imposing an order in our universe that didn’t exist before:
an order that is within our level of comprehension, but is somehow different
than the order that has been given to us, in our surroundings. I do this if I paint, for example, a bowl of
fruit. It may be a perfect likeness of
an actual bowl of fruit in front of me, or I might innovate by changing
particular elements of the picture, like the shades of color, or the number of
pieces of each type of fruit within the bowl.
Beyond this, I may produce a scene or images that draw from multiple
experiences of mine, including various elements of each, thereby making it
completely unique, and original. The art
of painting has evolved over time, with advanced techniques of representing
perspective allowing painters to more accurately reproduce scenes of depth. But with the growth of technology, and
particularly the advent of the camera, artists were spurred to go beyond
producing, through painting, reproductions of actual scenes, or even original
but realistic portrayals of fictional scenes, and do something more: something
that would require the viewer to be more creative in his or her interpretation
of the work. We find an extreme example
of this in the work of Jackson Pollock, who randomly splattered colors of paint
onto a canvas. In the chaotic array of
colors that resulted, the viewer is invited – or challenged – to find in that
chaos an underlying order that is pleasing to the eye. This introduction of intentional randomness,
chaos, or cacophony, is actually the hallmark of all great works of art. Great musical compositions move beyond the
simple repetition of pleasant-sounding melodies and introduce novel sequences
of notes that at first seem to disrupt or even destroy the comfortable pattern,
but then resolve into a greater, more complex melody that is ultimately more
pleasing to the ear. In his book, The
Rigor of Angels, William Egginton describes how in the creative process of
writing a mystery novel, this combination of order and chaos, familiarity and
unpredictability, in a suitably balanced way, is absolutely essential:
You make
it through three-hundred-plus pages, and the culprit turns out to be a
character you’ve never met before with no connection to the story so far.
Surprising? Certainly, but no one in their right mind would judge this to be an
excellent way to end the story. Now let’s say that in the mystery you’re
reading, each clue led so inevitably to the final revelation that you could see
it coming a hundred pages before the end. Clearly that would be unsatisfying as
well. In the first case you would be faced with a random occurrence, an
unmotivated insertion into the structure of the novel that destroyed any sense
of its coherence, its purposiveness. The novel is certainly surprising, but
there is nothing inevitable about it—the occurrences seem random, without
purpose. In the second case, however, you’ve seen the author’s handiwork the
whole way through; it’s all inevitability with no surprise, all artifice with
no naturalness.
And it is not just in the arts, but in scientific invention and
discovery where a process like this plays out, where random discoveries or
unanticipated outcomes of controlled experiments are combined with existing
systems of knowledge (sometimes over the resistance of those who are
intellectually wedded to the existing systems) to produce something new, or
better. A popular apocryphal story about
Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb is that he tried
running an electric current through an immense number of alternative metal
filaments – each which burned out rather quickly, if working at all to produce
light – until he finally tried tungsten as a filament material. Whether it is the artist playing with
different combinations of colors or sequences of words or musical notes and
then integrating them into a structured work, or the scientist experimenting
with different materials and techniques, the process is the same: it is an
intentional foray into randomness in order to find a new, satisfactory product
of order.
But in defining creativity as an act of imposing a new order
in our environment, we have to be careful and not imply that by doing so we are
always creating order where none existed, or creating a greater order than
existed before. When a new building is
raised, regardless of the sophistication of its design, or the novelty of its
architecture, it may not be imposing a new or greater order in the area that it
is occupying. If the land where it is
constructed had first to be cleared, then an entire ecosystem, with complex
interconnecting webs of diverse animal and plant species had to be swept away .
. . destroyed. As so eloquently
expressed by songstress Joni Mitchell in her classic song Big Yellow Taxi,
“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”.
“Yellow Taxiing” creation – the tearing down of one form of order to
create another – reminds me of that old joke about a dim-witted man who fell
off of a cruise ship and found himself washed up on a deserted island. After a thorough search, all that he could find
was a small, fully intact sailboat floating in the harbor. And after giving the matter some thought, the
man realized that this was his way of escaping the island: all he had to do was
break down the sailboat and use the wood to build a raft. But “Yellow Taxiing” is actually a
fundamental element of creation, which is not just a nasty byproduct of
civilization. It is ubiquitous in
nature: even the simple process of food digestion is a breaking down of one
form of order in order to preserve or enhance another.
Picasso Untitled Sculpture (Chicago)
Of course, to the architect and the architect’s contractors,
what was standing in the way of their building (and its parking lot) was a
chaotic mess of weeds, wildflowers, and pests, and here we stumble upon another
insight: that what is order to one entity may be chaos to another, with chaos
often representing a higher order that is beyond the comprehension of many
entities. The spider that builds a web
in a corner of my living room has no appreciation for the furniture in that
room: the individual expertly-crafted designs and the way that the furniture is
carefully placed and positioned. I, on
the other hand, upon encountering its web, might see it as an ugly, gooey,
incoherent mess, completely unable to appreciate how the individual strands of
webbing were carefully constructed and conformed to an intentional plan. Pigeons have little or no appreciation for
the public statues that they perch on: who or what these statues represent, and
why they were erected. On the other
hand, both pigeons and humans alike might have difficulty making sense of the
Picasso sculpture that occupies Chicago’s Daley Plaza. I personally believe that the Chicago
architectural skyline looks magnificent when viewed from Lake Michigan, but I
have no idea what ecological diversity was destroyed to make it possible. Creativity, then, often involves creative
destruction, and, rather than the creation or advancement of order, often
results in the replacement of one form of order with another (perhaps even less
complex) alternative order, imposed by its creator.
These creative processes – “Pollacking” and “Yellow Taxiing”
– while explaining how intentional novelty comes about, still fall short of
explaining how novelty leads to increasing complexity. After all, if every living creature has a
limit in how much order it is capable of seeing and comprehending, then it seems
that no amount of effort is going to enable it to produce something of a
greater order, but simply new and different things that fall within its limits
of comprehending order. And the
Darwinian drive to effective adaptation would seem to lead only to a living
world of perfectly-fitting parts, rather than an evolving one, as popularly
understood.
It seems that it is the process of interaction, among living
entities, that is responsible for this – for creating a whole greater than its
parts. This is particularly evident in
human civilization, where no individual is capable of understanding all of the
science and technology which supports and sustains that civilization. I remember watching a documentary about the
great 19th-Century German mathematical genius Carl Friedrich
Gauss. The narrator said that he was the
last human being who was capable of understanding everything that was known at
the time about mathematics. After Gauss,
the field had become too broad, diversified, and complex for any single person
– no matter how gifted – to take it all in.
I actually had experience of this firsthand when I encountered a dirty
little secret in the university system.
It happened when I was in the graduate program in economics. To earn a degree, a student in that program
has to take two comprehensive exams – one in macroeconomics, and one in
microeconomics – and, as the name implies, the exams were intended for the
student to demonstrate that he or she had a sufficiently broad understanding
spanning the complete breadth and depth of these fields. To my shock and horror, I flunked the
macroeconomics exam the first time I attempted it: shocked because I had gotten
all A’s in the macroeconomics courses I had taken. When I went into the economics department
office, completely distraught, the secretary offered her sincere sympathy, but
also asked me if I had studied the practice exams. And then it hit me. “Of course,” I thought to myself, while
probably slapping the palm of my hand onto my forehead, “the practice exams!” I had forgotten my experiences as a graduate
student in the mathematics program at another university. That program, too, required the passing of comprehensive
exams as prerequisites for getting a degree, but everyone knew that to succeed
at these, one had to look at the practice exams. The field of mathematics was simply too broad
(as the Gauss documentarian had said) for even the most gifted student to have
a comprehensive knowledge of it. The
practice exams provided clues to the student on exactly what kinds of questions
would be asked: sometimes the only difference between these and the actual
exams were minor changes in wording or numbers.
With this resource, I had passed those two mathematics comprehensive
exams and now, after reviewing the practice exams available in the economics
department office, I went on to the pass the macroeconomics exam on my second
attempt (fortunately we were allowed a second attempt), and the microeconomics
exam on the first one.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
It is probably not too broad a generalization to say that
all of the sciences have grown so much in scope and complexity that no single
individual could have complete comprehension and mastery of any one of them, or
even of any of their subdisciplines. And
yet they continue to grow, as the underlying base of knowledge that supports
them expands through the contributions and interactions of their
practitioners. Even our economy works
that way, as so eloquently described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
In his famous pin factory example, he
describes how several individuals, each acquainted with only a simple distinct
task associated with making pins, can, when their work is coordinated, produce
many thousands of pins a day. And
through the “invisible hand” of the free market, individuals acting in their
own limited self-interest can promote broader economic ends that had not been
part of their intention, and probably beyond their comprehension.
In civilization, then, our sciences, technologies, markets,
and social institutions are larger in scope than any individual can completely
comprehend or manage, but it is through our collective activity that they are
not just sustained, but continue to grow in complexity. And if we look at the life process in
general, from the simplest single-celled organisms to the multicellular
vertebrates, we can see that it is a collection of individual living entities,
each a separate “I-ness”, with a boundary separating “self” from “non-self”,
and a limited, often selective ability to perceive its environment, which
paradoxically exhibits an innate drive to expand its particular cone of
awareness, and of activity, in order to survive, if nothing else. And this leads to interaction with other
“I-nesses”, which in turn leads to those expanding webs of interconnection that
produce the growing complexity of the ecosystem. But this is a living process, not a
mechanistic one, beginning with that mysterious “I-Thou” relationship (as
Martin Buber would call it) in which a living entity senses that another entity
it encounters is somehow, in some way, like itself.
Female Praying Mantis Eating Its Mate
I know that biologists have a counterargument to this view
of individual entities acting in their self-interest, and by doing so, in a
manner similar to Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand”, creating and
sustaining complex systems greater than what they could ever individually
manage or even comprehend. This is the
“selfish gene” theory: a more mechanistic view of evolution in which genes,
rather than individual self-interest, are the real drivers of adaptation. And there are many examples to support their
view, in which individual members of certain species engage in acts of
self-sacrifice that, while self-destructive, actually further the chances for
their particular species’ survival. Many
examples of this stem from the sexual impulse which, like emotions, are a
characteristic of living beings that will never be duplicated by machines. (I have no doubt that someday robotic sex
toys will be able to convincingly simulate a human being in the throes
of sexual passion, but I firmly believe that no artificially intelligent
machine will ever be able to genuinely feel sexual desire or
passion.) The most extreme cases involve
those unfortunate male insects and arachnids for which surrendering to the
sexual impulse is their final living act.
Even in human beings, a surrender to the sexual impulse is often a
self-destructive act, resulting in the destruction of public reputations,
careers, marriages, and – in cases involving the abuse of power – the loss of
freedom. But from the perspective of the
selfish gene theory, this occasional self-destructive tendency of sexual desire
– at least in those cases involving insects and spiders – actually serves to
further the survival advantages of the species, particularly when the dying
male becomes the next meal for the mother of his future children.
But there are counterexamples, where an individual of one
species sacrifices its life to save an individual of another. I’m thinking of those cases where a dog has
died fighting off some wild beast, like a bear, to protect its master. Now even here a biologist might argue that
the “selfish gene” behavior is actually at play, because the noble behavior of
such dogs will encourage humans to perpetuate their lineage. But this can’t explain the reverse situation. Humans will go to great lengths to protect their
animals, even at risk to their own lives.
I can think of one particular tragic case, involving a young man who was
visiting a hot springs national park.
His dog dived into one of these hot springs, and in spite of the shouts
of others standing nearby to let the dog be, the young man dived in as well, to
try to save it. Both of them died. Less dramatic but significantly more common
examples of human benevolence to other species include the placement of bird
feeders and bird baths by homeowners in their yards, and taxpayer-supported
wild animal sanctuaries and national parks.
But even beyond this, we have seen, over the past century or so,
increasing numbers of human beings taking up the cause of environmentalism, and
expressing an active concern for the welfare of other species. This actually seems to be a byproduct of the
growing cones of awareness and action made accessible to each of us by
civilization: a growing cone of empathy as well. To be sure, many if not most human beings
still direct most of their empathy to relatives, or close friends and, to a
lesser extent, those who share their religious views, or political views, or
ethnic, racial, and national identity.
Sadly, one only has to check the daily news to see rampant and often
tragic examples of political, ethnic, and religious tribalism. And yet, that growing cone of empathy is
there as well, and it continues to grow.
It provides a hopeful sign that maybe evolution – including the
evolution of human civilization, with its computers and other machinery –
actually does make us better, somehow, or at least increases the potential for
each of us to be better versions of ourselves.
Artificial intelligence, if properly harnessed, will only enhance that
potential, perhaps significantly. In
this light, I can understand the ebullient (but still cautious) optimism of
futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who believes that technology, including that of
AI, is accelerating our evolution. The
point, however, is that at the heart of evolution there will always be a real,
living heart . . . and mind (“. . . and,” some might add, “spirit”). AI will augment our potential to engage in
creative projects of a higher order.
Yes, it will also present a potent lure to indolence, as well. I suspect that in our future, many if not
most of us will spend at least part of our days – and some will spend all of
their days – behaving like those overstuffed couch potatoes in Wall-E,
and perhaps there is a real risk that an excess of “Yellow-Taxiing” creation
will leave our world as ecologically desolate as that in the movie. But for at least some of us, hopefully many
of us, and ideally most or all of us, we will have and use a greatly enhanced
ability to put our individual creative powers to currently unimaginable greater
ends.
And the ultimate arbiters of how valuable those creations
are will be living, human beings, who are capable of feeling the awe expressed
by Henry David Thoreau while gazing up at the clouds. Computers will be able to write essays on
these creations, and even imitate works of art “in the style of” certain
artists, or in conformity with the tastes of a particular audience. The greatest works of art, however, are those
that create new styles and move beyond conforming to existing tastes. Sometimes they actually compel the tastes of
their audience to “evolve” in order for them to truly appreciate the genius of
an artistic innovator. That’s real
evolution – creative evolution – and it is the evolution that is at the heart
of life.
I couldn’t resist ending this long essay by simply putting
the fundamental question which I was attempting to address to ChatGPT: “What is
the ultimate purpose of evolution?” Here
is the reply:
The
"ultimate purpose" of evolution is not a question that has a
straightforward scientific answer. Evolution, as understood through biological
science, is a natural and ongoing process without inherent purpose. However,
the question of purpose can be explored through various philosophical,
religious, and personal lenses:
·
In science: Evolution is a process without inherent purpose or
end goal.
·
In philosophy: Purpose is a human concept; evolution itself lacks an
intrinsic meaning.
·
In religion: Some views see evolution as part of a divine plan.
·
In practical
terms: Evolution helps us understand
life and informs ethical frameworks.
Ultimately,
the purpose of evolution can be seen differently depending on one’s perspective
and the questions one is seeking to answer.
It’s a good, comprehensive and noncommittal answer, and
ultimately a comforting one, in that I know that at least at the present time, AI
has not developed any concrete plans for my future, or for that of the rest of
the planet.
