Our beautiful flaws are what make us human
IMAGINE a world in which you went to hospital and were treated by a robot. There would, of course, still be doctors, nurses and surgeons, but machines would operate on their patients. A Brave New World fantasy or an imminent reality? As it turns out, it is something just waiting to happen.
According to one eminent Irish physician I know, robots will play a pivotal role in medicine within 20 years. As they become more sophisticated, they shall undertake a whole host of tasks traditionally performed by human beings. Unlike us, robots don’t suffer burnout, get tired or shake in the middle of a procedure.
What’s more, they can assimilate vastly more knowledge and can be programmed to do things of great delicacy and complexity. At a time when doctors and nurses are stressed and exhausted to the limit, artificial intelligence (AI) promises a safer medical environment. It also offers the prospect of a more efficient health service.
Who could possibly object to that? We all know how chronically congested our health service is and how overworked Irish medical professionals are. If AI could help solve those problems, why not embrace it as the way of the future?
Like me, I imagine many of you shaking your heads in despair and foreboding. Human beings have many flaws and weaknesses. Our long history contains much of which we cannot be proud.
And yet, for all our self-inflicted wounds and disasters, ours is a species that can have pride in its moral progress. Our advances in science have been matched by sublime leaps of the human spirit. Where once there was only cruelty and domination, now there is compassion, tolerance and love.
Lately, my sons have been watching Planet Of The Apes. Those movies told of a time when sophisticated apes subjugate the human population. Is this an allegory for what many eminent scientists – including the late Stephen Hawking – fear will happen when artificial intelligence becomes too powerful to control?
The fact that our middle son could not restrain his tears when viewing those movies, tells its own poignant story. The apes were engaged in a moral struggle regarding how to treat humans. Some desired endless suppression, while others ought to coexist in peace.
For the most part, the apes had compassion, empathy and mercy. Somehow, they had morally evolved to the point where they could cry and care and love. There was still cruelty, but it was always balanced by sympathy.
Perhaps they may yet devise a computer chip containing all those vital emotions which make us human. Perhaps the machines that dominate our future will be possessed of something akin to the human heart. But when people like Stephen Hawking are predicting that full AI ‘could spell the end of the human race’, you have to be doubtful.
I am not saying we should deny ourselves the obvious benefits that machines may well bring to medicine or to other areas of our lives. Unquestionably, there are many things that AI can do far better than humans. However, doing something better is not the same as doing it with sensitivity, wisdom or compassion.
Surgeons may be fatigued and stressed, but they are, first and foremost, humans who have been conditioned by their kind. They live and think and feel as their patients do. They have felt pain, suffering, joy, friendship and love.
LIKE their patients, they are fully sensitive to our earthly predicament. They experience disaster as tragedy and can empathise with those for whom life has lost all meaning. And, even though they must guard against excessive empathy, they understand that, while unavoidable, death is not something that can be borne without intense sorrow.
Machines cannot mourn. They can’t weep, and neither can they suffer. They can never know what it is like to face the darkness in the absence of light. Knowing that we will one day perish is what gives life meaning and purpose. We love today because tomorrow may not be ours. We sacrifice for others because we realise that, while we are strong, we are also immensely fragile.
To care for human beings without knowing how to love, mourn and laugh, is not to care for them at all. For all their flaws, surgeons understand just how precious human life is. They do so because they are mortal beings who fear and weep and pray for miracles just like the rest of us.
But what are we to a machine that will never know loss?