More Barriers Falling
AI is rapidly forcing human beings to reckon with the question, “What are we?”
Even as I was finishing up my Pandora’s Box essay last night, I considered whether to add something about AI. I ended up deciding against it, because the essay had come around rather nicely, and it’s generally a bad idea to introduce major complications right at the end of a piece.
Nevertheless, the connection was certainly in my mind when I wrote that,
For centuries, the unyielding demands of necessity (the basic imperative to keep people fed and warm) shielded human cultures to a great extent from the hard task of grappling fully with the immense complexity and diversity of human persons. Those “protections” have been falling with terrifying speed, and modern societies are scrambling to come to grips with the new reality.
We’re still working through the implications of an AI-oriented world, I think it’s clear that even more of those “protections” will fall, pushing us to reckon not only with the question “what is this amazing technology” but also, more uncomfortably, “what are we?”
There are many hard questions here, and happily Yuval Levin has raised many of them in his rich and interesting response to Pope Leo’s new encyclical in the New Atlantis. It’s very respectful but also has some serious, substantive critiques. The final paragraphs (but read the whole thing!):
This care about the formation of our souls seems to be where Pope Leo wants to point us. But to do so more effectively, he will need to grapple more fully with the potential, promise, and peril of the extraordinarily transformative power now increasingly falling into our hands. Magnifica Humanitas is too dismissive of what this power involves, what these technologies are likely to be capable of, and what that will mean for how we understand ourselves.
The transformation we are now embarking on will humble us. Like a number of prior advances in our understanding of the universe, it will force us to narrow the range of what we take to be uniquely human, but also to sharpen our focus upon it.
That kind of humbling comes with pain, and is most naturally experienced as loss. If we are instead to experience it as a deeper learning about the nature of the human person, we are going to need guidance from people well versed in what that nature consists of. It seems to me, from a distance, that Pope Leo XIV is such a person. I hope that he, and others of his caliber in other communities of learning or faith (including my own), are up to the teaching task before them. It’s not yet clear if anyone is.
Right, you can't drop love. But what love is called to do is generally much more limited and practical than trying to fully grapple with human complexity and diversity. However, it's true that people often need to be appreciated in order to flourish, and that practicing the Golden Rule can require a lot of imagination.
So this is mostly wise, and I agree that one of the most fascinating things about AI is how it forces the issues of human nature and human flourishing to surface far more urgently. Much of what we thought was human is suddenly performable by machines. But something isn't, and it's remarkably difficult and fascinating to articulate that residual of humanity that the machines can't simulate. I have this overwhelming intuition that AI frees us to be "more ourselves," whatever that means.
But I got stuck on this:
"For centuries, the unyielding demands of necessity (the basic imperative to keep people fed and warm) shielded human cultures to a great extent from the hard task of grappling fully with the immense complexity and diversity of human persons."
This seems to unpack as something like:
1. We have a duty to grapple fully with the immense complexity and diversity of human persons.
2. But formerly, it was so difficult just to keep people fed that we had an excuse for shirking (1). Necessity was a "shield."
3. Now moderate economic growth removes the pressure of economic necessity, so we're forced to do (1), and that's hard.
But wait a minute: where does (1) come from? Why is it a task? Who assigned it?
We can *delight* in the complexity and diversity of human persons. But it's no one's job to grapple fully with it! If it's a burden, drop it! Love may create a duty to work hard to understand the complexity and diversity of specific people that we know. But any notion of a universal right to be fully appreciated is off track. It's too great a demand to make against us, and it has no basis.
Meanwhile, there's still a lot of desperate material need in the world. That's not because we failed to fully grappled with people's complexity and diversity. It's because we unjustly use force prevent them from doing what they need to do to better their lot.
This sometimes feels like the overindulgent musings of an aristocrat who wants to double down on self-actualization, while beggars are starving at his door.