By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ In all things human, when we try to get to the nitty-gritty of who we have been, who we are, and who or what we will become, the chicken before the egg debate can be counted on to enter the conversation at some point. For instance, no matter how far science can take us back or forward, religion always counters by asking “And what was before that?” And “What will there be after all that?” The idea is that there is always, no matter which direction we head, a prior something or other, a subsequent something or other, a before and after – which remains God’s unassailable dominion. Without beginning or end.
Of course science will never take this for an answer, and, though I am reluctant to confess it, the older I get, the more I side with science. You would expect the opposite, wouldn’t you? I mean, when all other combat against the stark inevitability of death fails, God is the escape hatch, the governor calling at the last minute to stop the execution, the ultimate reprieve. Right?
So, to paraphrase Pascal: if you believe in God and God turns out to be real, you’re riding a winner down the home stretch to Heaven. If you believe in Him and He ain’t there, what have you lost? At least you covered your bet. If you DON’T believe and he’s really NOT there, you have the consolation of dying knowing you were right (Hard to say how you would know, but whatever.). But if you don’t believe in Him and He is there, then you’re well and truly fucked. For Pascal, the solution was obvious. #1 is the best way to go, but #2 also works.
In the meantime – between the two forevers – lives existential man and existential woman. I would even go so far to say that although I cling to the belief that the dick defines the man, I find it disquietingly significant that nowadays there is a clusterfuck of genders. I say ‘significant’ because, unlike in the past, this points to a growing confusion as to who (and what) we really are. The human race seems in the middle of a major identity crisis. And the more I think about it, the more I conclude that it is not the multitude of ‘genders’ we now reportedly have that rankles me, so much as the ‘progressive’ types who are always yapping about it and trying to make us accept their narrative, agenda, and doctrine. Just shut the fuck up, I say, and everything will be fine. It will work itself out as things always do. In fact, the slippery slope of the gender issue is important without all the screaming and bellowing.
In fact, this androgynous stuff started long, long ago – long before people like Twiggy and David Bowie came along. As a matter of fact – true story – I once had a girlfriend who, during our love making, liked to fix me up to look like a woman, lipstick and all. I didn’t mind – I have never been one to call the SWAT team to round up those who like kinky sex. And – as a woman– I was a Stone Fox. (Just to let you know.) The fact that my lady lover was a stunningly beautiful Italian fascist who still spoke highly of Mussolini even spiced things up more. Ah…those memories. Those Kodak moments.
But the reason I mention ‘identity’ confusion is not just for a lark or for confession. No, what I want to discuss now is the question of what it means, not to be simply man or woman or variations on the theme, but what it means to be Human. Of all questions that have been asked through the ages concerning the meaning of life and the proper path mankind should follow, few have projected their analysis toward the very concept of what a human being amounts to in the first place – at least not in a sense beyond trying to determine if we are really nothing more than apes with college degrees, but rather whether or not we are machines. A lot of science fiction has pitted us against hostile machinery (I am not a buff, so maybe I have overlooked something), but usually, win or lose (like in 1984) we are the good guys. Moreover, the implication that God wants us to win is in the air. You can almost taste it and smell it.
Of course the Clarence Darrow courtroom drama about evolution was a landmark in the discussion, but the opposition shouted “We believe in the Rock of the Ages, not the Age of the Rocks!” – if that tells you something. So, for all our attempts to identify and authenticate ourselves, we have never doubted that we are alive. Not until fairly recently. We have questioned our origins and our destiny, but – kind of like cheese and cabbage – we have taken for granted that, well, here we are. Nurses usher you into the world, parents parent you, teachers teach you, prison wardens lock you up, the undertaker smartens you up, and the gravediggers or cremators dispose of you. If you are lucky, you are remembered for a little while.
All the clever stuff was left to the priests and philosophers.
Then science came along, and gradually a number of disruptive issues started to arise. First of all, we learned that we do not think with our hearts. That little Valentine in our chest is really only the faithful donkey that keeps pulling the wagon. The rest of it begins and ends ‘upstairs’. Then chemistry confirmed that we are just a bunch of atoms and molecules. Our brains are little gray sponges lit up like an old-fashioned switchboard by a hurtling rush hour of sparks. Most of our total boneyness is in our skulls, and the rack of active calcium-saturated sticks and sinewy cables that keeps us upright has undergone millions of years of training to enable us to play football and dance the boogaloo – yet a single, simple spinal cord injury can remove all motion, all feeling. It ain’t fair. Eons upon eons of biological construction ruined in a careless moment of falling down the stairs or doing an ill-advised back flip.To make matters worse – and to complete this somewhat dismal thought – did you know that the average adult human being is composed of up to 60% water? Here is a quote that brings more bad news:
According to Mitchell and others (1945), the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.
So now we know. We are not much more than a tall glass of water. (Or a pitcher of piss, depending on your outlook.) Ok, established. Now: Enter Artificial Intelligence. And my question becomes one which many people have an automatic answer to, which means that they are probably wrong. The question is this: Can (and will) humans and robots become equals? By this I mean, equals in every sense of the word? I am asking, if a human-like body and human-like face (no mistakes, no ungainly knobs poking out)) can bring the robot to the point where it is physically indistinguishable from the human, and if the level of communication can become so convincing that it is really interactive rather than something finally detectable as false, what other sticking points can there be?
Well, the only ones I keep hearing – and they are powerful ones – comes down to this: we are human and they are not. We program them, not vice versa. We exist; they do not. We have unique personalities; they are only the sum total of what we install in them, the mechanical offspring of our algorithms. Their design and destiny is to repeat, repeat, repeat, spit out our data, be ‘impregnated’ with more, and churn out another ‘bank’ of stats – and these in forms that seem more and more awesome, but they are our products, our creations, our toys. Without us, they are nothing. Properly programmed, their jaws drop when ‘surprised’, their lips perform passable imitations of elusiveness and desire, their brows furrow in worry or disappointment, their cheeks grow too bright because of embarrassment or just radiant enough to convey romantic passion – but only because of us. We are their real suns, and they are our artificial suns. At the end of the road, their eyes can please us but not deceive us.
Accordingly, we have employed them as our indentured servants.
Do you follow me? They relieve us of monotonous work, they offer us every convenience, they can do household chores like whirling dervishes, hock-spit mathematical miracles, they can take our parts not just in the warehouse, but in the surgery, the stock market, the home, the car, the classroom. Ok. But where will it end? Already it’s vibrators that drive the orgasm as much as He or She. Already IT – disguised as a man, woman, or dog or cat – has ‘learned’ to seduce us.
The machine at some level must surely ‘understand’ (because we have programmed it with our own knowledge – which I don’t think is necessarily static information, but actual emblems of our own needs, biases, and sorrows) that we live in the chaos of ourselves. We have only this to go on, truth be told, and all else is imagined experience. Even the latest science tells us the same: true or false: we do not love others; we love what others stimulate in us: love for someone else is the tender little fib we tell in order to get more and more of the dopamine induced joy and bliss and ecstasy we crave. Therefore, ‘love’ – so says modern science –is a chemical reaction. And as soon as one particular human love-provocateur loses potency, we either settle (with a sigh) or go looking for someone else to ‘love’.
Don’t you see? It is all about us; the ‘other’ is a mysterious and mystical pill in human form that we digest with water, milk or the drug. The other human is a fantasy whose power is based on its ability to make us suspend our disbelief and enable us to forget that we are alone. The people in the room, the crowds on the boulevard, the mob at the station – all fantasies, all make- believe, just like people in the graveyards.
We are partners in crime. Like the old Playboy magazine cartoon I saw once of the suburban couple, tolerably satisfied after coitus, discussing their just concluded sexual ‘activity’. “Ok, you tell me who you were thinking about, and I’ll tell you who I was thinking about.”
Yes, it’s that bad. But how often is it true? Certainly, all masturbation is driven by some fantasy or other.
So, guys, you have already lost the Me vs Them game! Your smile and the AI smile are soon to be the same – they in their haunting imitation of our imagined depths, in their ability to pluck nuance out of our ‘souls’ like barnyard chickens devouring seed. Name your science or art: You are wandering into what has become known in some literary circles as Magical Realism. Reality, however mundane it seems, is never what you think it is; it wobbles always on the brink of utter distortion and a reconfiguration of everything that you believed or took for granted a moment ago.
You have caught a bus expecting to go somewhere, maybe some abstract address in the boiling-with-billions city, impossible to navigate without technology or a competent driver, but you believe it will work because, well here’s the address– and you trust the address, or rather you trust your faith that it contains the name and numbers to a real place. But the bus inexplicably turns off the road and drives on and on, refusing to answer your questions but allowing phantom people to get off at various points, until you realize that there are no more kiosks and the whole thing has been set up just for you. You have left conventional reality and now enter the twilight zone.
Suddenly, you are pierced by the driver’s decisive voice and told to disembark – let out into a small town of jagged little streets and a market place in the middle. People look at you. Strangers. You intuitively understand that you will never leave this place of strangers. They will never become familiar – you will always be the odd one out – and that at first seems to be the difference between the old world you left and this one where you have arrived. In the old world they stopped being strangers after a point. Here they will not, they never will. It then occurs to you, cruelly, that in the old world they were never more than strangers either. The notion that you really knew them was as insubstantial as mountain mist in the morning. And the reason is that, in this magically ‘real’ town, all the strangers look exactly like your former family, friends, and associates. But instead of “Hey, Neighbor! How ya doin?” they stare at you with the blank expression of jurors. Are they teasing you? They never render a verdict.
It seems to me that we already live in a world of artificial intelligence whether we admit it or not. Even harder to admit is the likelihood that we are artificial too: human water carriers with electricity in our heads. We can understand this, not when we smugly look at the robots and declare, projectile finger pointing with authority, “I exist; you do not.” – but when we draw back into ourselves and come face to face with what is really there: electric water.
Think about the old paradigm that people lived by for centuries: 1. God; 2. Human Soul; 3. Human Form. Put simply, as I saw a bumper sticker proclaim in America: “I knew you before you were in the womb.” (This is God talking.) So we are born into this human form, but it is the soul that counts, for only the soul – not the flesh – can connect us to God. So far, so good. But Nietsche and the others came along with the argument that, instead of God creating us, we created Him. And today that is what a growing number of people believe: God is Dead. Scratch one of the three pillars of existence. Then the scientists told us that we do not have ‘souls’, and that our existence is only a body-based experience. Thus, when the organism dies, not merely the intellect but the so-called ‘soul’ dies along with it. So there is no God for the Soul to go to because neither God nor Soul exist. It is all human fantasy. Exit #2. So we are left with the physical body which, we now are told, is a test tube, nothing more.
That doesn’t stop us. We busy ourselves creating robots fashioned after the bundle of images and impulses that constitute us as closely as we can; we tinker with them, walk about the room spying at them from every angle like theater-in-the-room, adjudge them damn near perfect; then we presume to stand in front of each one and say, “I exist; you do not.”
I know a 10-year old Chinese boy called Hans (maybe he had a German uncle), and the other day Hans brought up the subject of AI and robots. Hans made the comparison between the human being and the water melon. He said in effect that a natural watermelon is seasonal, not always tasty, and invariably full of seeds. In other words, as much of a nuisance as a treat. But now we have developed synthetic watermelons which never go out of season, are full of delicious, springingly rich fruit that does not diminish near the rind, and (bonus points for this one), No Seeds. In short, the perfect watermelon! The only catch is that it is synthetic, not natural.
Do we care as we are slurping away on this ripe red hunk of ‘fruit’? Of course not. So – to complete his analogy – if the human being, for all its biologically driven efforts to improve, can make these improvements synthetically instead of waiting for another 100,000,000 years for nature to get it done – then, why not?
In fact, we are already doing it. The sophisticated prosthesis of arm and leg that means we can walk without a limp and even enter the Special Olympics; the pacemaker that helps the heart pump the vital blood (we don’t have artificial blood yet); a metal rod in the broken leg to help the bone and tissue mend; eye glasses so we can read a text, hearing aids so we can listen to the lecture; vibrators and viagra to make sex better and in some cases even possible; botox for the wrinkled skin, cosmetic surgery for the uncooperative or aging flesh – all of the above and more! Tell me then, dear reader, where does the artificial stuff leave off and the real self begin? In the past the real body was what you were stuck with. No more. Not anymore.
Now we can falsify or ‘intensify’ – if you prefer – ourselves into new and improved versions of ‘ourselves’. We can let technology do the work.
Repeat: we can let the technology do the work.
So maybe now, we should tell the robot: “I exist, sort of…partially, well, hell, not really. But you’re kinda pretty. Hey, Honey, wanna fuck?”
You think I am joking. I already know who the joke is on.
The point is this: we want the pleasant effect, the orgasmic sensation; the augmentation of our fantasies. If the pet dog is only a machine, we get used to the fact that it’s not really real.
Doesn’t he wag his tail, shake his ears, pretend to pant with a lolling tongue? And guess what? He won’t ever need the vet, he won’t need a walk but he won’t shit on the floor either. No barking late at night, no chewed up shoes while he is ‘teething’. No, none of those inconveniences. You can plug him in and you can unplug him. Good Boy, Prince. Nice doggy.
And people, please don’t feed me the line about how you know that it’s ‘just’ a machine. Shit yes you know, but gradually you cease to CARE, and that’s the whole point. The artificial dog gives you the same pleasure – after a while – as a real one used to. Without the trouble.
It’s the same with artificial Christmas trees, plastic fruit and fake ‘exotic’ plants in corporate offices. All competent facsimiles, phony to the 10th degree. All bullshit. And we don’t care.
We don’t care because it never was about the dog, the Christmas tree, and the Polynesian vine. It was always about us. Does it make us feel good? Little Hans calls it our obsession with convenience – and he is right. We want the emotion unearned, the big payday without doing the work. Love on the half-shell.
Mark my words, my fellows. As Baudelaire wrote: Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! (”You know him reader, this delicate monster; hypocrite reader, my twin, my brother.”)
So this marriage of our artificial selves with an equally artificial robot will come naturally, comrades – believe me, it will. You know, they say that drowning, once you get past the panic, is actually a pleasant experience, full of peace and serenity. Freezing to death is much the same, or so I hear.
Life is nothing but a form of adjustment and readjustment. Evolution has neither conscience nor a particular game plan. It just is. Like technology. We are one form of technology in the business of creating another. Birds of a feather. Meanwhile, be patient. Your faultless lover is still an immature assembly of nuts, bolts, data, and algorithms, But she will mature; she will walk naked into your arms. Lick your lips and be patient.
AI Bias Check:
