Digital Soul by Thomas Georges

Author:Thomas Georges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Level 2: How We See Ourselves

Moral and ethical issues at the second level include questions about how human morality and ethics will evolve as we gain a more complete understanding of how the human mind works. What really bothers people about AI is how the development of intelligent machines will change the way we view ourselves. They worry that scientific models of human thought will undermine the spiritual foundations of human dignity (Chapter 17).

People have dealt with such revelations before, usually with no more disastrous consequences than the demise of a few archaic institutions. When the connection between sex and procreation first dawned on prehistoric human cultures, primitive lawmakers, priests, and witch doctors had to scurry around inventing new codes to regulate sexual behavior. It seems likely that this “knowledge of good and evil” coincides with the idea of original sin and the story of expulsion from the Garden of Paradise recorded in Genesis. Copernicus displaced Earth from the center of the solar system. Darwin showed that higher life forms (implicitly including humans) evolve from lower ones. Einstein showed that no frame of reference holds primacy over any other. Our first view of Earth from space profoundly changed, for some, the way we view our place in the universe. Such truths are always shocking—particularly to those whose livelihood depends on old paradigms—but moral and ethical codes slowly but eventually catch up.

Slowly for sure. Machines that are smarter than we are would cause us to rethink the way we view ourselves, but we would cling for a long time to the notion that we are the intellectual center of the universe—just as we continue to speak of the sun and the moon rising, even though we understand how the solar system works. New views of ourselves are always humbling, but humans have a history of slowly, though grudgingly, acceding to the truth.

Margaret Boden, in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, offers an upbeat view. She says that AI research will ultimately show that although human beings are grounded in the material world, their individual, uniquely complex arrangements of matter and energy distinguishes them from “mere matter.”1 This view may be some small comfort to those who find a scientific explanation of human nature dehumanizing.

Sometimes new views of human nature spawn deviant behavioral codes—maladaptive side trips that lead only to dead ends. Evolutionary theory has a sordid history of assimilation into social and political ideology. One episode, known as social Darwinism, thrived around the beginning of the twentieth century. Racists and capitalists invoked the “survival of the fittest” to justify repression and exploitation of “inferior” classes of people. The Nazis mingled selected parts of evolutionary theory with their political agenda to rationalize supremacist doctrines, which included eugenics and extermination of “lower races” and “mental defectives.” Today, genetic engineering lets us think about farming human organs and designing organisms, even babies, to our specifications. These technologies are ripe for abuse and present us with more subtle moral and ethical dilemmas than their antecedents did in the days when they were called selective breeding.

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