Human of the Gaps
Searching for humanity in the crevices of the machine
God of the Gaps. The last redoubt of many a flustered theist on the losing end of a debate. As the march of science soldiers on like Sherman through the swamps of Georgia, it leaves in its wake little pockets of resistance. Girded against the onslaught, defending their positions till the last man, these isolated forts provide a last stand for the faithful to hold their ground against a seemingly unstoppable force.
Pointing to these bastions, lonesome warriors cry out “But see! There lies a question science has not answered. A question it cannot answer. Set aside your arrogance, your certainty, and look with clear eyes upon proof of the divine! God is not gone. He is found in the gaps that human understanding cannot reach!”
I have never found this a satisfying response. As a being of unabashedly secular leanings, perhaps that represents a failure on my part. But as best I try to put myself in the shoes of others, I cannot imagine that those of a more faithful persuasion find it satisfying either. It is fundamentally the strategy of a force in the midst of retreat. One that cannot muster its reserves and marshal an attack against its foe but, at best, hopes to slow its inexorable advance and, with the grace of an ever shrinking God, preserve what it little it can.
In recent years, I have observed a similar trend. Another army, retreating in the face of advancing force. A foe that seemingly cannot be stopped as, bit by bit, it chips away at our defenses and conquers territory we once believed would be forever our own. An enemy of light and silica, striking at the heart of all we once believed made us the unique and precious beings we are. I fear now, in the face of AI encroachment, humanity has become like God.
We did not always fear the machine. Oh, perhaps we feared how men would use it. Men with wealth, with power, with the means to break our lives and our livelihoods on racks of iron gears. Who, in the name of progress and efficiency, might tear apart everything we knew and rebuild it, brick by dark Satanic brick, into a new world of steam and steel.
They did of course. With rare exceptions, we let them. Because, truth be told, we knew they were right. We saw the fruits of their work and our labors. We saw the power of machines; pumping, drilling, breaking, moving. The labor of ten men, done by one. The labor of a thousand, done by ten. And more. More! Labor beyond the skills and strength of every man that could be mustered, done by machines.
Slowly, we allowed our world to change. Not without a certain amount of despair, of course. Some from those who lost what they held dear, some from those who did not gain all they had hoped to receive. But there is a reason the countryside emptied for the town. A reason why the peasant turned, willingly, into the factory worker. The back-breaking toil of the fields was loved by few. Many were happy to turn those backs upon the land and look with hopeful eyes upon the engines of progress. Engines which, sputteringly, haltingly, catastrophically, dragged us into a better world.
For a better world it is. Despite the nostalgia that some seem to have for a world they have never truly experienced, few willingly abandon the comforts and conveniences of the modern world for a life of pre-technological struggle. Those that try soon realize that no life of pastoral bliss awaits them in the gentle bosom of Arcadia. Mother Nature’s teeth and claws are ever present and ever red; ready with drought and famine and beast and plague to lay low the naive fantasies of those who do not respect her.
For our current lives of relative peace and leisure, we have the machines to thank.
And yet…
I do not know on what day we first truly learned to fear the machine. To feel in our bones, in our soul, that something this time was different. When we had the first glimmer of recognition that the seemingly never-ending upward spiral of technological improvement was proving that we, perhaps, were not as special as we once dreamed.
The first computers did not truly threaten us, but in them we see the germ of what would come. Thinking at the speed of light, with perfect recall, they were well suited for the tasks given to them. But they seemed far too clumsy in their thinking, too logic-bound, to be able to make the jump to more human activities. “Math is just logic puzzles. Of course a machine can perform that with ease. Humanity was not made for such cold, unfeeling work.”
Deep Blue’s defeat of Kasparov was, I think, the first true shot across the bow. The association of chess with intelligence and creativity (even genius) is so well-established in the Western mind as to be cliche. When Kasparov conceeded, that perception was shattered and, perhaps predictably, we were treated to more than a few rationalizations as to why chess was not actually that important a breakthrough. “Ultimately, chess favors the advantages of the machine. Pattern recognition and total recall. It’s no surprise a computer can out-compute us.”
Other games lasted slightly longer. Go, that ancient game of territorial control, did not fall until 2016. Long considered a particularly formidable stronghold, the victory of AI came as a surprise even to some of those who worked on the problem. Go was thought too complex, too large a possibility space, for AI to simply brute force its way to victory. Human creativity and intution seemed to hold their ground for a time, but in the end they fell all the same. “Well, games after all are a self-contained system. A space of perfect information and well-defined rules.”
The real world is a far messier place. To navigate through it requires constant adjustment to an ever changing sea of variables. For a long time, this fundamental difficulty flummoxed efforts to create machines which could make their way through our world. That time has passed. Today, driverless cars and their ilk are held back far more by politcal considerations than technical ones. “Moving through space is something any dumb animal can do.”
And what of our vaunted creativity? Our capacity for language? For story-telling? For art? I sincerly doubt that recent achievments of AI in those fields needs another re-telling. The Turing Test has fallen. AI can write. It can draw. Perhaps not as good as the best humans yet, but better than all but a few (and faster than all) in these still early days. The walls may not have been breached yet, but the sappers are hard at work. “Well, AI art is barely worthy of the word. All it does is take the products of real artists and combine them into something different. There is no creativity occurring. It has no true voice, no true perspective. The essence of art is the expression of an individual viewpoint…”
At a certain point, one must be honest about what direction the wind is blowing.
Pablo Picasso once said that computers were useless, as they can only ever provide answers. Pithy, but there is some truth in it. Agency is one of the last true fortresses that the machines have yet to breach. It may be that true self-awareness, the development of a true perspective, remains forever out of reach of our silica children. Perhaps we will never crack the code that breathes real life into circuitry. Perhaps the force of evolution will never bootstrap them to sentience the way it did for us. In this way, we might still remain special. Unique.
I find this small comfort. Who is to say how long this bastion will hold. Even if it does, what sort of victory does this leave us with? Already, we have seen that self-awareness is not required to simulate a version of human experience that eclipses the ability of many real humans. AI can write better, play better, think better, without needing a true inner life. If the essence of our uniqueness is so unnecessary to do the things we live to do, where does that leave us?
In truth, it leaves many of us where we already are. Look around your world. Are you the best at anything you do? Are there others who are stronger, smarter, more skilled? Of course. The names of every human who legitimately can be said to be irreplaceable could likely be written on a single page. The advancement of AI generalizes to our species what was once merely true for individuals. We are no longer (or soon will not be) the best. There is another who can do what we do better.
I do not mean to deny or downplay the practical difficulties that will arise from AI continuing to surpass us. If human labor can be truly replaced, and not merely enhanced, then the consequences to our world and way of life will be immense. Our current economic paradigm may well be on its last legs, and what the future looks like in that regard, whether our path leads toward dystopia or paradise, I will not hazard to guess. But on the subject of what this means for our self-conception as a species, for our conception of ourselves as human, I believe the path for is not quite so dark as many fear.
The story of AlphaGo is instructive here. For centuries, the tactics and strategies of Go had been tested and codified. Fuseki. Koseki. Tesuji. In China, Go was considered one of the four cultivated arts of the ideal gentleman and lavished with time and energy by the upper class. In ancient Japan, four houses were given state-sponsorship to promote the study and perfection of the game of Go. That venerable legacy, accumulated by the sweat and tears of thousands and passed down to us with utmost care, was decisively obliterated in 2016.
It is not just that AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the greatest players of his generation. It is how it defeated him. It employed strategies that had never before been conceived by human minds. Moves which at first glance appeared to be grave mistakes later revealed themselves to be strokes of genius. It violated the rules we thought we knew and in doing so taught us how to play our own game anew.
To many, this represented the death of Go as an area of human endeavor. Sedol himself retired a few years after his defeat. His final words on the subject cast a grim shadow, not just over his own career but over those of all future human Go players: "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated." To one who has defined himself by excellence, by standing alone atop the mountain, the idea that there now exist heights he could never hope to scale must seem the death to any point of further ambition. Another fortress breached. Another bastion of our humanity laid waste.
But our story does not end here. For there were others that did not long hang their heads in grief and sorrow. For those willing to look, AlphaGo had shown them a way to entire new realms of Go experience. Human players began studying the games of the AI, learning its lessons and adopting its teachings. In the years since the machines dethroned us from the crowning glories of Go, the game is experiencing a re-calibration, perhaps a Renaissance, unlike anything it has seen in centuries. In making us obsolete, AI has also made us better.1
This I think, is where we find our way forward.
Greatness has always pushed us to be better than we are. What child has not looked upon their heroes with awe and hope; of sportsman of exceptional skill, artists of divine inspiration, or thinkers of titanic insight, and dreamed that perhaps one day, with luck and talent and effort, that could be them. For most, this dreams slips away as we age. As we realize the limits of our in-born abilities and, slowly and often sadly, reconsider what we want from our lives. But in our best moments, that desire to be better does not leave us. Though we may never reach the heights others have scaled, they have at least marked the path upward, if we ever desire to try an ascent of our own.
Yes, the machines have passed us by and will likely continue to. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but sooner than we fear. But in doing so, they have, perhaps inadvertently, carved new roads through the wilderness of potential human experience. Now, with powers beyond our capacity and perspectives shaped by mental architectures of alien design, they stand ready to guide us down paths we were unaware even existed and, if we let them, lead us towards realms of thought and being we could not previously have comprehended.
We built fortresses in the gaps to protect the last bits of who we are. To keep safe for just a little longer everything we treasured as the essence of our being. But though our fortresses began as a means to defend us, we find in the end they are a trap and a tomb of our own making. Stepping outside them is frightful and dangerous, for it could mark the death of who we are. But it also contains all that we may yet become.
Open the gates, and let us see where our children may lead us.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ais-victories-in-go-inspire-better-human-game-playing/
So good
FWIW, I think perhaps it is not the machine (hardware) so much as the software. Anything biological is a machine but software, like math, is a human-invented abstraction with rudimentary (and ever increasing) intelligence. Much of the incredible and exponential advance in the last 70 years or so can be tied to what software has done for us.