Thought Shrapnel

While I think this post overestimates the ‘rupture’ of AI, it is very well-written and certainly makes the reader think about the “clean arguments and messy implications” of “computation without consciousness” in a market which is a “sorting engine for outcomes.”

For me, though, the thing which is missing from this otherwise well-written piece is that human exceptionalism applies to everything we do. We are full of paradoxes: we keep some kinds of animals as pets and eat other ones. We talk about the wonder of Nature while destroying it. We see ourselves as separate to the natural order of things rather than part of it.

I find it interesting to see which people get worked up about AI. Writers and artists, for sure, as their livelihoods are on the line. But also, I would suggest (and separately) people who see humanity as somehow special and unique—without, necessarily, being able to describe what that uniqueness is.

The podcast episode I was listening to this morning on the philosophy of self-destruction is illustrative here. Georges Bataille a philosopher I’d never before heard of, argued that the thing that makes us unique is our tendency to self-destruction and sacrifice. What that means in relation to “the boundary between human value and human utility” I’ll leave for you to decide.

We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer. We are the animal that understands. We are the creature that feels. We are the author of meaning. Then the machines arrive with more memory than our institutions, more patience than our professions, and an ability to synthesise that makes much of our work look like the slow rearrangement of furniture. We retreat to consciousness and call it the final moat. Perhaps it is. The trouble is that markets do not pay for qualia. They pay for results. A system that can pass for understanding in most practical situations is enough to reprice our worth, even if it experiences nothing while doing so.

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What makes the present rupture stranger [than previous ones] is not that tasks are being automated. That is an old trick. It is that the rungs we used to climb are melting away beneath our feet. The legal apprentice once learned by reading mountains of documents. The junior developer learned by slogging through bugs. The analyst learned by cleaning data until patterns flashed in the mind like weather. Now the entry work evaporates. A machine does it in minutes and does not complain. We congratulate ourselves on efficiency and then discover we have created an experience cliff. We are asking people to supervise work they were never allowed to do. Even the best intentioned upskilling will falter if the pipeline that produces intuition has been hollowed out. This cliff also suggests a remedy in simulated apprenticeship, a deliberate redesign of early careers where newcomers learn by validating and correcting machine output rather than by doing the drudgework the machine has removed. It is a shrewd answer, and it may be the only bridge we can build at speed.

[…]

Philosophy arrives, as it tends to, with clean arguments and messy implications. You can hold on to the view that computation without consciousness is never true understanding and still lose the economic game. You can be right about the inside of experience and wrong about the price of it. To be consoled by the thought that machines do not feel while they outpace us in most of the places society rewards is to win a metaphysical medal and find no one pays for medals. The market is not a seminar. It is a sorting engine for outcomes.

[…]

The line we have been defending is the boundary between human value and human utility, and we have treated them as if they were the same. We have been racing to remain useful because our institutions can only recognise worth through productivity and pay. A civilisation that automates most of its work must decide whether it will abandon people or invent a new grammar for dignity. We can reform education until the syllabi shine and still fail if graduation delivers people into a labour market that no longer needs them. We can preach lifelong learning as a secular catechism and still feel the hollowness if learning has nowhere meaningful to land.

Source: Hybrid Horizons

Image: Drew Beamer