I suspect we are because it was key to our survival in the unknown.
Since the dawn of mankind we are struggling with the natural environment.
We feel humbled by the infinite force of rain floods and erupted volcanoes.
We feel passionate and calmed by the fragile innocence of our children.
They break things in front of us, we tolerate it as part of a long slow process which will take them to maturity.
Young professionals may receive the same treatment. We tolerate their flaws and mistakes. We know they are not at their prime yet.
What can we say about senior teachers or senior nurses?
Maybe at the face of great mistakes made by them, we resort to taking a deep breath and thinking: “Ok, we are all humans. We make our mistakes.”
We conform to that. We accept (or at least “deal with”) mistakes at crucial times maybe because of something imprinted in our DNA that values altruism and social stability.
However, the “infinite forces” are still there for us to struggle with. And maybe technology could be the right weaponry for the fight. But I suspect it has a price for us to pay as society. I’ll be back to this later.
The movie Interstellar (2015) has two scenes that, to me, illustrate the role of tools replace humans in critical situations.
Pilot Cooper (above) commands the AI robot named Case to take full control of the ship in case Cooper passes out during a docking maneuver. Cooper knows he would eventually back out under intense force G caused by his ship’s spin. He conforms to his natural human limitations and pre delegates the responsibility to the robot.
In another scene, Dr. Brand gets stuck under the wreckage of another spaceship while a huge wave approaches. The AI robot is once again commanded, this time to rescue Dr Brand before the wave hits her. A task no human could do at that pressing moment.
AI Robot Case saves Dr Brand’s life.
We don’t share the same complacency with humans with man made technology. Should Robot Case had failed in both tasks, we would get different feelings about the situation.
Nowadays there is a lot of discussion about how and when AI is going to replace humans in various professional areas. The discussion became really incendiary when Bill Gates said on a TV show that most professions will be replaced by AI, including teachers.
My questions are:
- are we ready to interact socially with beings not complacent to our flaws?
- do we want to interact with something so precise, so binary as a digital equipment?
Of course, we can see now in the responses to our prompts that AI has been continuously “calibrated” to feel more human to us and take a “shades of gray” approach to topics that are more sensitive or open to subjectivity.
But that won’t change our nature, as it has developed organically over millennia.
We’ve got to this point in evolution because we were socially malleable. We are adaptive.
— “Can’t we adapt again to live with AI as it is?”
I’d go back to my two questions above.
Because I don’t know. (I learned this week that IDK must be highlighted)
I do know what I fear, though. I fear that by replacing teachers and other highly socially interactive workers with AI, our young ones will gradually lose the capacity to be complacent with our weaknesses, our natural human limitations.
What kind of outcome can we expect from this point onwards?
How would AI teach us to deal with imperfection while being perfect to our eyes?
From an AI standpoint, would it be important for a human being to set distinctions between those who behave “more like AI” and those who behave more like “human”?
Will we only accept perfection?
Are changing the concept of “perfection” to perfection? From subjective to objective?
Will it be worth discussing “subjects”?
Will we still be subjects?