The Daily Walk #2

Let’s Take a Walk.

A friend of mine (thanks Matt!) sent me this clip of Pope Leo’s recent speech that essentially called for the disarmament of AI. (Regardless of your religious affiliation or lack thereof, I wholly recommend viewing this relatively short clip.)

It’s a bold statement, for sure, & we all like a good bold statement to arouse our emotions every now & again.

So I opened the link, put my headphones on, hit play & began the daily walk.

And you know what I heard? Not the headline. That was misleading, in my humble opinion.

No, I heard echoes of what I’ve been saying here on this substack.

I heard that we will not succeed in “killing” technology or technological advancement. After all, where would we be without ploughs, tractors, irrigation & modern sewer systems? Instead, I heard that we must be intentional prior to & during its use. We must deploy it in ways that make us better at all the myriad things we humans do, & must specifically avoid allowing it to replicate human work.

For jobs often give us purpose. Not all of it, no, but some of it.

And if we strip that purpose away, what is left of our humanity? We have our faith, yes. But the majority of us were not made to work in churches. We find our purpose in other jobs, noble causes, raising our children.

But as we relinquish more & more tasks to AI, we find that what it means to be human is whittled down, layer by layer, until there is nothing left to remove.

We humans do not just exist in our minds. We exist here, in this physical realm. One could argue that many of our mental illnesses derive from an overemphasis on the mental, inner world paired with a lack of physical activity in this very real world of ours. Because of this innate duality, AGI cannot ever know the correct way forward for humanity because it does not exist corporeally. A corporeal existence is a necessity to understand elation, pain, sickness, hunger, thirst, love. Without the feedback loop provided by a physical existence, it lacks a critical component of what it means to be human: empathy.

And what do we call a human without empathy? A sociopath.

If we are to frame these technologies in terms of comparing them to humans, this is my best analogy.

That said, these technologies are just that - technologies. It’s a bit of an oxymoron to call an AI soulless because it doesn’t exist in a realm where this is even a possibility. And trust me, we do not need to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing it. This way leads to cults and ever-weirder outcomes. We have enough on our plate as it is without having to contend with machine worship.