We need more wisdom to handle artificial intelligence

Technology has accelerated the pace of our lives beyond our capacity to keep up

It’s not just the elephant in the room, it’s the elephant in the universe — and the elephant is still a newborn. I’m talking about the development of artificial intelligence and how we can be prepared for what happens when, as MIT professor Max Tegmark put it, “machines outsmart us at all tasks.” The need to have this conversation, “the most important conversation of our time,” is the subject of his new book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the

Age of Artificial Intelligence, which I’ve just finished reading. It’s one of those books that you can’t put down and instantly call up friends and harangue them into reading it, too.

Tegmark is a physicist, cosmologist, scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute, and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. And his new book should be required reading for anybody who cares about technology or the future, which is to say, everybody.

And that’s because the new advances are different from anything that has come before. The rise of AI, and the increasing and overwhelming hyper-connectivity of our daily lives, has the potential to erode our humanity in unprecedented ways. In fact, it’s already happening — our addiction to our phones and our screens, allowing them into every part of our lives, is changing how we interact with each other and with ourselves. As Thích Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk, put it, “it has never been easier to run away from ourselves.” A study from Microsoft found that the human attention span now drops off after about eight seconds (about one second less than a goldfish). And studies have also found that the presence of a phone in social interactions degrades the quality of the conversation and lowers the level of empathy people feel for each other.

Our technology allows us to do amazing things, but it’s also accelerated the pace of our lives beyond our capacity to keep up. As Isaac Asimov wrote in 1988, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

And with the advances in AI that are right around the corner, we’re going to need all the wisdom we can get. It’s easy to caricature those sounding the alarms about AI as being, well, alarmist. But it becomes harder when you realise that many of them are among the most visionary voices in science and technology. Like Stephen Hawking, who told the

BBC that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Or Bill Gates, who said he doesn’t “understand why some people are not concerned.”

And then there’s Elon Musk, who certainly can’t be called a luddite. In 2014, he warned that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” and said that “if I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.” This is why in 2015 Musk donated $10 million to Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute to help assure that AI is developed in a safe way.

What’s fascinating about the debate about artificial intelligence is that it isn’t just about the threat AI potentially represents to humanity, but about what it actually means to be human.

If humans were simply intelligent machines, they could be seamlessly blended with the most intelligent of artificial intelligence with nothing essential lost. But if there is something unique and ineffable about being human, if there is such a thing as a soul, an inner essence, a consciousness beyond our minds, becoming more and more connected with that self — which is also what truly connects us with others — is what gives meaning to life. And it’s also what ultimately determines why technological progress decoupled from wisdom is so dangerous to our humanity. As Yuval Harari wrote in Homo Deus, “technological progress has a very different agenda. It doesn’t want to listen to our inner voices, it wants to control them. We’ll give Ritalin to the distracted lawyer, Prozac to the guilty solder and Cipralex to the dissatisfied wife. And that’s just the beginning.”

So AI is — or should be — forcing us to think seriously about what it is to be human. And then to take steps to protect our humanity from the onslaught of technology in every aspect our lives as we’re becoming increasingly addicted to our smartphones and all our ubiquitous screens.

If the debate is won by those who believe that if human beings are nothing more that the product of biochemical algorithms, does it really matter if we are reduced to, as Harari put it, “useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in lala land”? Or, for that matter, measuring our self-worth by the number of likes on Instagram?

Part of our wish list for our lives and our future should be disentangling wisdom from intelligence. In our era of Big Data and algorithms, they’re easy to conflate. But the truth is we’re drowning in data and starved for wisdom.

As we’re flooded with more and more data and more and more distractions, and as artificial intelligence grows more intelligent, it’s essential that we appreciate and protect separate and innately human qualities like wisdom and wonder. In contrast with intelligence, Tegmark writes, “the future of consciousness is even more important, since that’s what enables meaning.” He goes on to contrast sapience, or “the ability to think intelligently,” with sentience, “the ability to subjectively experience qualia,” which he earlier defines as “the basic building blocks of consciousness such as the redness of a rose, the sound of a cymbal, the taste of a tangerine or the pain of a pinprick.” Up until now, he writes, “we humans have built our identity on being Homo sapiens, the smartest entities around.” But “as we prepare to be humbled by ever smarter machines,” he urges us to “rebrand ourselves as Homo sentiens.”

Of course, there are some who believe we are nothing but machines, and that to even bring up the idea that there’s something unique or sacred about humans or human consciousness is somehow anti-science. But science and qualities like awe and wonder — which have often gone hand-in-hand with scientific discovery — aren’t antithetical. They have co-existed for millennia. Here is how the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson described it: “When I say spiritual I am referring to a feeling you would have that connects you to the universe in a way that it may defy simple vocabulary,” he said. “We think of spirituality as an intellectual playground but the moment you learn something that touches an emotion rather than just something intellectual, I would call that a spiritual encounter with the universe.”

And it’s that kind of encounter that has the potential to be lost if we don’t take the warnings about technology and humanity seriously.

What’s fascinating about the debate on artificial intelligence is that it isn’t just about the threat AI potentially represents to humanity, but — a much more interesting and consequential debate — about what it actually means to be human