On Human Perfection
“Understanding AI as carrying a religious inheritance reveals the founding premise that the human condition is fundamentally limited and thus a defect. That our bodies are too slow, our minds too inefficient, our mortality an engineering problem to be solved. But our physical, embodied experience is not a flaw to be corrected. It is true intelligence, the source of our wisdom. Not a lesser version of it, not an obstacle to it, but the thing itself. As long as we accept the framework of AI’s architects, defining intelligence as processing speed, and progress as the transcendence of human limitation, we will continue to outsource our power to systems shaped by a tradition that treated humanness as the problem. Until we redefine intelligence, success, and societal progress, we cannot think freely about AI, and we will continue to surrender our imperfect capacities that make us perfectly human.”
Batsheva Labowe-Stoll - https://arcmag.org/the-deep-spiritual-history-of-ai/. A helpful short summary of religious themes haunting much AI discourse today. What is striking to me is the way AI debate replicates theodicies, as if an AI god might save us from ourselves in some possible future. That this is not the best of all possible worlds seems obvious, as Voltaire noted in his 1755 poem after the Lisbon earthquake. But how are we to respond to such events in ways sensitive to our imperfect embodiment as human beings who suffer? It is a tough philosophical challenge, and the reason why anti-theodicy also arose such as in Immanuel Kant’s 1791 “On the Failure of All Attempted Theodicies.” Debates about evil in a world created by an omnipotent, benevolent deity can distract from practical responses to reduce pain and suffering in the here and now.
William James’s Will to Believe was a pragmstist step in this direction. James imagined a train robbery to make the point. If everyone stood up to resist the highwaymen, they’d likely avoid being robbed. For James, beliefs should be justified in light of their potential for producing a meliorist result. If faced with a chasm to leap, having gauged the evidence, believing you can make it will improve your likelihood of success. Such arguments capture both our embodied limits as well as the sensitivity to reduce suffering where possible.
Where AI discourse fails is in its crass opposition to embodied life. It’s a point made well about transhumanism in general by Ashley Shew in “The Minded Body in Technology and Disability” in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. There she notes, “Cast as first-adopters while also being imagined away (with the idea that technologies will make us nondisabled), technologized disabled people (or cyborgs) have ideas about bodies and technology that don’t match the technological dreams of elite designers and technology leaders. Relying on the testimony and experiences of disabled people helps us reimagine our technological futures.” I think this reimagination is increasingly a task for all embodied beings, and Labowe-Stoll’s essay is another reminder of this task.
