The Scent of a Rose
Everywhere I see individual takes on the world – political, social and historical – while human expression and thought are being compressed by the narrow interests of a few. I ask myself amid this welter, what is the Human Experience? What makes us human beings? And why are some considerations driving us away from that awareness? As human beings we may not even know what it is to be human – or a human being. Because every human being has a different experience of themselves, they seem to me to cling on to that difference as a sort of validation for their existence. What if human beings could identify that thing that makes us human? Maybe we could identify what is the human project. What we can be.
It is, probably an unanswerable question- philosophers have been banging their heads against it for several thousand years and have, so far, not come up with a complete or well accepted answer. In fact, I don’t think there ever will be a satisfactory answer but I still think that it behoves us to keep trying. And not leave it to the philosophers alone. Keep asking the question.
It is clear that Artifical Intelligence is going to play a larger part in our day to day lives from now on. And we are to be influenced by the narrow interests of those who own the algorithms. We could say, that as a species, this is the first time we have, indeed, been confronted by a Higher Intelligence. But not one that originates from some sort of Sci-Fi Universe. It was not brought here by silver saucers from the stars or on scrolls delivered by trumpeting angels. It is here among us now.
But AI, for all its actual intelligence can only mirror the human experience. We may live alongside it and enjoy its company but it will never have human intelligence because human intelligence relies on our own direct experience of the world and our reactions to it. AI resides in large temperature controlled warehouses in out of the way places. It cannot observe a rose bursting from its bud in hedgerow or smell its scent. It cannot have the appreciation of the world that is built into our genetic foundations. AI can talk about the scent of a rose but it can never experience that for itself. AI is an Intelligence but it is not Human Intelligence.
And so, for me, we would be well to ask those questions about what it does mean to be human. Not what drives us apart, or makes us different – that is already cooked into our make up – but ask those fundamental questions about our experiences as a species.
Don’t forget, every time you catch the scent of a rose , see it blooming in a hedgerow and feel its delicate fragility you are doing something human – something that AI cannot do and will never be able to do however enormously powerful it becomes.
