The headline on my blog posting, today, is the headline on an opinion column by David Brooks of The New York Times. The above picture is from his column, too.
Brooks is commenting in his column on Artificial Intelligence, the same topic I addressed in my blog posting on February 23rd. Brooks uses, as an example of what Artificial Intelligence can do, a work of art created by the Midjourney computer program - the very same piece of art that I commented on back in October of last year:
Brooks seems to be concerned about the same issues I am concerned about, as I see how new technologies are increasingly trying to remove human beings from both ordinary and creative work. His column is directed to college students, too, just as my February blog posting was. Brooks seems to share my perspective. He advises college students who must prepare themselves for life in an "AI world," to plan to "major in being human." Here is what he means:
If, say, you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? You probably want to avoid any class that teaches you to think in an impersonal, linear, generalized kind of way — the kind of thinking A.I. will crush you at. On the other hand, you probably want to gravitate toward any class, in the sciences or the humanities, that will help you develop the following distinctly human skills:A distinct personal voice. A.I. often churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communications or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own.Presentation skills. “The prior generation of information technology favored the introverts, whereas the new A.I. bots are more likely to favor the extroverts,” the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen writes. “You will need to be showing off all the time that you are more than ‘one of them.’” The ability to create and give a good speech, connect with an audience, and organize fun and productive gatherings seem like a suite of skills that A.I. will not replicate.A childlike talent for creativity. “When you interact for a while with a system like GPT-3, you notice that it tends to veer from the banal to the completely nonsensical,” Alison Gopnik, famed for her studies on the minds of children, observes. “Somehow children find the creative sweet spot between the obvious and the crazy.” Children, she argues, don’t just imitate or passively absorb data; they explore, and they create innovative theories and imaginative stories to explain the world. You want to take classes — whether they are about coding or painting — that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone your imaginative powers.Unusual worldviews. A.I. can be just a text-prediction machine. A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. Stock your mind with worldviews from faraway times, unusual people and unfamiliar places: Epicureanism, Stoicism, Thomism, Taoism, etc. People with contrarian mentalities and idiosyncratic worldviews will be valuable in an age when conventional thinking is turbo powered.Empathy. Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique individual right in front of you. If you want to be able to do this, good humanities classes are really useful. By studying literature, drama, biography and history, you learn about what goes on in the minds of other people. If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular.Situational Awareness. A person with this skill has a feel for the unique contours of the situation she is in the middle of. She has an intuitive awareness of when to follow the rules and when to break the rules, a feel for the flow of events, a special sensitivity, not necessarily conscious, for how fast to move and what decisions to take that will prevent her from crashing on the rocks. This sensitivity flows from experience, historical knowledge, humility in the face of uncertainty, and having led a reflective and interesting life. It is a kind of knowledge held in the body as well as the brain.
I believe that AI is posing serious, and in fact "existential"
questions, and we all need to be aware of the processes we have put in
motion, processes that seem aimed at removing human beings from all those situations in which we, individually and collectively, are "in charge."
Given where we are, all of Brooks' recommendations seem good to me. However, I think that Brooks' recommendations are not, themselves, sufficient to prevent the subordination of human individuality and creativity as Artificial Intelligence obtains an ever greater purchase over our lives. I think, in other words, that we are in "deeper" than Brooks seems to suggest.
As anyone who regularly reads these blog postings won't be surprised to hear, it is my view that we are going to have to confront the dangerous realities ahead - forces that seek to subordinate human beings to our own creations - with a robust, "political" response. And "political" efforts means efforts we carry out together. It's active work.
Contemplation, as we relax in a hammock, under a beautiful tree, is not what I have in mind!
Image Credits:
(1) - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/ai-human-education.html(2) - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
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