Subservience v. Super-Sentience

In the age of Artificial Intelligence and biotechnology, I am asking myself what it is to be human.

Diving into more AI learning with Mustafa Suleyman and Nvidia’s Rev Lebaredian, I have launched my search for human essence. After years of living in La-La Land about the Great AI Takeover, my denial is now lifting. And I admit, I’m gripped by the gleaming armies.

The relentless automata are advancing and I am scrabbling for points of differentiation: what is our special Homo sapien sauce, dear humans? This week, I found some clues in chats with friends, and a lovely bunch of strangers up the Pig and Abbot pub.

Aside from seeking the heart of human nature, I’ve also been spinning the plates of working motherhood, including animating our little AI, the Elf on the Shelf. Twice this week, I have forgotten to hide Elfie before bedtime (despite repeating the command in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth). My memory is that powerful.

All in all, I’m facing the fallibility of my bamboozling brainbox – but perhaps there’s a beautiful clue in that wonkiness?

My question about human uniqueness breaks down into two parts:

1) Where am I now willing to surrender to AI’s phenomenal powers?

2) What am I still holding on to as uniquely human?

Helping me out (and simultaneously feeling like a ticking bomb under my bed) is The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman. The early chapters have convinced me that the twin technological superpowers of Artificial Intelligence and biotechnology are coming. Here come the AI and Biotech robo-super-surfers on silver tsunami waves. They are crashing into our coastlines, rolling over skyscrapers, flooding our towns, submerging the old world order.

Writing in 2023, Mustafa Suleyman said, ‘In the coming decades, a new wave of technologies will force us to confront the most foundational questions our species has ever faced. Do we want to edit our genomes, so that some of us can have children with immunity to certain diseases, or with more intelligence, or with the potential to live longer? Are we committed to holding on to our place at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, or will we allow the emergence of AI systems that are smarter and more capable than we can ever be? What are the unintended consequences of exploring questions like these. They illustrate a key truth about Homo Technologicus in the 21^st Century. For most of history, the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped: the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring it continues to serve us and our planet. That challenge is about to decisively escalate.’

That’s kinda intense, Mustafa. Go easy on us pre-digital babes, my love.

Mr Suleyman, I am a crossover human being, born in 1977. So yes, punk spirit is within me, anger is an energy, all of that. But I am also a sensitive and slow analogue type, and you are blowing the circuitry in my tiny mind. Yes, I accept, this revolution is more bewildering for me than it is for my daughter, Natalie. Aged seven, my girl is learning basic coding principles at school. She expects her machines to serve up precisely defined content. She has been weaned on search algorithms that tailor to her viewing habits. She has taken with ease to prompt engineering and Generative AI image-making. Her brain is building in our AI-powered world.

But still, Natalie needs to be prepared for what’s coming – and Mr Suleyman, I now realise that I need to be one of Natalie’s teachers about this technological revolution that you helped to create. I need to educate my girl, while I affect a wholesale rearrangement in my bonce.

Mustafa, can you fling me the manual of how I walk Natalie through all this? Right now, I feel as suited to the job as Worzel Gummidge in a firework factory.

When I grew up, it was technical wizardry to dial the operator on 100 and reverse the charges when I missed the last bus. When it comes to adopting new technologies, I am a longtail snail. My work made me use an iPhone in 2023 – my first time, Mustafa. And it has taken me eighteen months to figure out how to turn the ringer on. Turns out there’s a little switch on the side that silences the whole damn unit. I felt Jobsian when I clocked that.

All the AI hype has felt engulfing at times, an exclusive express-train for teenage techno-geeks and Elon eccentrics and investment gamblers – not a world that is inviting or coherent to me.

And yet, now that I’m looking at the steely-jawed chops of AI, it is compelling.

What exactly is so captivating about this race to create supreme machines that surpass our human intelligence? The answer I am settling on today is this: I am being confronted yet again with a question that I have grappled with all my life – how to be a convincing human being.

Since childhood, I’ve been trying to pass my human version of the Turing test – I have long suffered from a delusion that the Game of Life is about convincing other humans (who all have everything sussed out), that I am a passable human being. Call it awkwardness, social anxiety, sensory sensitivity, shyness, impostor syndrome, or just plain old weirdness – whatever it is, I have been trying to crack the code of human relationality for over four decades.

And now, the Mighty AIs are having a go, and they’re threatening to do human-ing better than us. As they try out trillions of simulations of human intelligence, I do feel some connection with them. This persistent illusion in my life, that if only I can learn all the right scripts and moves, that I can then match with each life encounter, then I will pass the test of appearing human – the life code will be cracked, my loves, and human relationships will be really simple, all of the time. Turns out I was wrong on that!

So, as the AIs shoe-horn into our human slippers, here’s where I am now willing to surrender:

Number one: I bow down to AI’s staggering computational power. You can eat your dry Data-Crunch cereal for breakfast, dearest machines.

Granted, I can sum a column in Excel, and I can turn spreadsheet cells magenta. However, the machines can chew millions of calculations per second that would baffle my brainbox for a lifetime. AIs can analyse variations in the human genome, predict and diagnose diseases, and personalise healthcare plans. AIs can analyse a year of my music choices, and whip up a personalised podcast, to celebrate (and poke fun at) my top 100 tracks: I’m looking at you, Spotify Wrapped.

And when I read a story from 2016, I almost cried. It was about Deep Mind’s AI, AlphaGo, mat-slamming the South Korean Go champion, Lee Sedol. Oh my God, I felt the man’s pain. After losing three games to the AI (in a best of five match), Sedol said: "I don't know what to say today, but I think I will have to express my apologies first. I should have shown a better result, a better outcome, a better contest in terms of the games played." Sedol lost 4-1 (and a million dollars) to a super-powered computer, and he conceded as if it was a fair fight.

Come in for a human hug, dear Lee - you woz robbed!

Number two: I accept AIs are learning to navigate simulated physical worlds and this will transform our global employment markets.

Nvidia is one company who have placed a mega bet on ‘embodied AIs’ taking over swathes of labour-intensive jobs (agricultural roles, factory work, transportation, and on). I was chatting to my friend John about this, and he got me thinking about the swathes of mainly men who traditionally have filled these roles. What next for them? Universal basic income? And what impacts will these rationed wages have on their sense of identity, self-esteem, their human need to self-determine?

On the Ted AI Show, Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s VP of Omniverse and Simulation Technology, said: ‘Being able to apply all of this computing technology and intelligence to things around us in the physical world, I can’t even begin to imagine the potential for the increase in productivity. […] Countries that have more people have more GDP. And so, when we take physical AIs and apply them to the world around us, it is almost like we are adding more to the population, and the productivity growth can increase. And it’s even more so, because the things that we can have them do are things that humans can’t or won’t do – they’re just too tedious and boring and awful. You find plenty of examples of this in manufacturing and warehouses and agriculture and transportation. We keep talking about transportation being this huge issue right now – truck drivers, we don’t have enough of them out there. This is essentially a bottleneck on a whole economy. Soon, we’re effectively going to have an unlimited number of workers who can do those things, and then we can deploy our humans to go do everything that is fun for us.’

It’s a utopian picture Rev draws – the AIs will free us humans up to play. Let’s hope, dear Rev. As we wave our white flags to the embodied machines, as we defer to their mathematical wizardry, analytical prowess, brute strength, their light speed capabilities, their tireless repetitions, and always-on-ness, let’s hope they do the jobs we no longer want to do. And while we write concertos and eat all the Italian ice cream, let’s set the AIs to work on the clean energy riddle to save our planet.

Here's where I’m still in the ring with AI – I am fighting for human super-sentience.

There are people who say that if we train these machines on enough big data and simulated human experiences, including what it is precisely to be sentient, to feel empathy, to care about others, to be relational, then these super-charged computers will eventually stake a claim on our emotional intelligence. They will learn what it is to feel pleasure and pain, their sensors will attune to read our tiniest lip tremble, a flicker of anger in narrowed eyes, the merest uptick of sweat on the brow. I feel an instant ‘fuck off’ rising in my gut to this notion. Emotions are our domain, you cheeky bots. I’ll switch you off at the plug if you come for our feelings.

This is where my research took me to the AI Hub that is the Pig and Abbot pub.

With Storm Darragh swirling outside the pub, whipping red-faced drinkers inside who were latching the door behind them, I quizzed a bunch of beautiful strangers. What is unique about being human? It was just what the Sunday lunchtime crowd needed, I know.

‘Surely, feelings are the unique preserve of human beings?’ I said. ‘Courage, hope, love, joy – we hold the rights to them, don’t we?’

Geoff, an investor in media companies, said I could be seeing it all wrong. His view was whether the learning is by chemical processing (human) or mechanical/ computational processing (machine), if the results and conclusions are the same, then does the processing mechanism even matter? A low blow.

I said to Geoff, ‘Yes, I can see the AIs are exponentially learning, replicating, advancing, but however good they get at assimilating and mimicking the human experience, all it will ever be is an act – they won’t actually feel what we feel?’

‘We might not know,’ he said. I dipped a Biscoff into my tea and soothed my brain with sugar. ‘Where we might have a stake, at least for now, is in thoughtful curation,’ Geoff said. ‘To give you an example in media production, look at all the AI slop out there. It’s filling up pages on the internet, mass-produced swill to generate clicks into sites. It’s total junk that does not connect on a human level, so many people bounce out. We still need humans to curate quality content.’ This felt like a win for human creativity, hooray!

Biologist, James, then arrived at the pub, ready for a pint. He sat down at the bar stool next to me. I launched in with my question, ‘Don’t think too hard about what I’m going to ask you, just say what first comes to mind – what is inimitably human?’

‘Passion,’ James said.

‘Yes, I agree. Passion is ours!’ I wrote it down and circled it. And then I babbled on about the obsessional madness of being a Tottenham season ticket holder who travels in a storm to the Spurs-Chelsea match, or the insanity of reading everything by Dan Brown, or collecting those Toby jugs that fill cabinets in vintage stores, all for the weird pleasure. ‘Yes, James! That must be a human-only quality. You have hit on something here. Thank you.’

Unfortunately, James instantly retracted his certainty about our passion uniqueness. Now he was thinking about it, there was probably a case for Darwinian-style evolution of the machines by random mutations, to the point where they can develop their own interests and quirks, and they will all head off down whimsical rabbit holes.

‘Oh, now you put it like that, that is kind of how the AIs teach themselves, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘There was that AlphaGo AI machine, it beat a world champion. In training, it kind of obsessively explored the game, then all by itself, it figured out brand new game strategies that no human had seen before. Move 37 is the stuff of legend – no human saw it coming.’

‘So, they could stumble across passion too,’ James said.

‘I’m not ready for this,’ I said. ‘It’s terrifying.’

And this is where Jack turned round, a lovely guy in his seventies, and said that there was nothing more terrifying than his wife, Pam, known as the Dragon since 1972.

Then Robert calmed me down with the exquisite differences between terriers (impulsive) and Labradors (thoughtful), sharing his passion for dogs.

And the machines melted away into the fireplace of human connection.

Could our humanness be in our mess?

In some respects, AIs appear to share some qualities with us humans in how they learn. Let’s hear from Nvidia’s Rev again, speaking about reinforcement learning:

‘One of the best ways for [robots] to learn is how humans and creatures learn. When a human baby is born into the world, it still doesn’t understand the physics of the world around him. A baby can’t see depth. They can’t really see colour yet. They have to learn how to see colour. And over time, over weeks, they start learning those things, they start learning how to classify. They classify mum and dad and siblings, apple, ball […]. They also learn about the laws of physics through a lot of experimentation. So, when you first start giving your baby food and putting food in front of him, one of the first things they do is drop it or throw it, breaking things, throwing things, making a mess. Those are essentially science experiments. They are all little scientists that are trying things until they learn it, and once they understand how that physics works, they move on. Robots learn in the same way, through this method called reinforcement learning, where we throw them into a virtual world […], we give this robot the ability to perceive and actuate inside that world, but it doesn’t actually know anything. But we give it a goal – we’ll say, ‘Stand up’. And we have them try millions and millions of iterations of standing up.’

So, we share this learning-through-mistakes model with the AIs. Machines do mess up a lot in their training and development. There is a whole lot of randomness in how they figure things out. They crash and burn in simulation tests. They hallucinate. They are only as good as the data they are learning from, which is often flawed. They get stuck in loops and act inexplicably. All quite human and fallible, really.

BUT, the AIs don’t feel or care about their mistakes. They don’t get physically or emotionally bruised by their errors. They feel no regret or fear or confusion. They feel no joy at overcoming each hurdle. There is no bleeding when they slip up and fall over, no scab that stitches them up, no knitting of fresh skin. They are different to humans in this regard: they feel no pain or elation in their learning process.

Do I aspire to learn in the same relentless, unemotional way? Or are my pain processing abilities my greatest asset? Machines already beat me at speed, brute strength, mathematics, code-breaking, strategy, games, chewing in and summarising millions of words, and looking fit in a skin-tight catsuit. But is there something advantageous in feeling my human fallibility? In acknowledging deeply how much I don’t know, do I access my human superpower?

If I could flick a switch, would I turn off all the pain of not knowing?

If an embodied AI machine approached me in 2030 and said, ‘Here Charlotte, here is the Book of your Future Life. In this book, you can read the story of everything that is going to happen in your life, from now until the day you die. Here it all is: supreme, all-knowing, detailed, foresight.

• You will know every step that you will take, every daft adventure, every marvellous moment and tedious chore.

• You will have prior knowledge of every plot of the novels that will fire your imagination, move your heart.

• And in this book, there is all the love you will share with the people you will meet in your life.

• You can find out which people stay in your life, and which people leave - would you open this book and read?

• And there’s a whole section about Natalie, how she grows, and what she will be curious about in every year of her life to come – you will know what music speaks to Natalie’s soul, and what interests will capture her heart, and who she will love, and who will love her fully, and whether she has children or not, and what age she will live to.

• Here it all is in this Book of your Future Life, which you can choose to read now, and then you’ll be able to predict what is coming for all time.

• You’ll know everything with perfect certainty.

• You can train for all of these human experiences in advance, practise your human scripts, and ace your exacting Turing Test of Life.

• And then you won’t have to be surprised by anything along the way, you can tone down or switch off your feelings for good.

• Do you wish to read the Book of the Rest of Your Life, Charlotte?’

Noooooooooooo! Burn that book!

Human life is about the unpredictable dice rolls

Living to the full is about taking risks, knowing full well that we cannot engineer outcomes precisely. For me, the human experience is about daring to love, aged 47, in a way I have never allowed myself to love before. It’s about facing fear of loss to access super-sentient joy. Being human is about walking the highwire, eyes across to the mountaintop. It’s about knowing I could stumble and fall into the chasm below, but I keep going because that’s the thrill of being human – the potential for failure, all of the time, makes succeeding always feel like a miracle to me.

Showing up to life in this super-sentient way, despite all fears we come up against, gives us our ticket to the Present-Extraordinary, a portal to life experiences that surprise and energise us. Surely, this is our human preserve – we do things with no guarantee of predicting the outcome perfectly. Each day, we know we could fly in planes of courage, hope, love and joy, or we could be dashed to pieces on the rocks, or we could coast along in pale blue sky. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? That is our secret!

Yes, AIs may learn how to mimic this risk and reward experience, of course. They may be trainable in how to give a flawless performance. No doubt, the AIs will be convincing actors in self-awareness, self-doubt, spiritual development – but I don’t yet believe that the machines will know innately what the fallibility miracles feel like.

Human life is not a performance

Life isn’t a test to ace, nor a rinse and repeat formula. As much as I have craved the codification of human experience, believing that a set of rules could help my brainbox tolerate the ups and downs of human relationships, this has been a powerful delusion.

In the end, every interaction we have is unique. Whilst there are acceptable norms and social rules I can apply to situations, human experiences light up when I can be as open as possible to explore the moment I am in. What characters are in the room with me? What happens if I try to see their way of looking at the world? What is revealed if I ask them questions about their life? How am I changed each time I abandon the safe scripts? There is always the exquisite risk of whether I will feel loved, loathed, or worse, be met with total indifference. So I’m holding on to the not knowing it all for now – as it’s what makes human life extraordinary.