Brain Food #810: What it means to be human
When AI has all the answers
Thoughts of the day
You might have come across some form of generative AI tool in recent weeks, whether that is DALL-E for image generation or ChatGPT for text generation. ChatGPT in particular has been wildly popular, helping developers code, writers produce content, and curious minds discover new information and comprehend complex concepts.
A question that often arises, even if it might be too soon to have a definitive answer, is whether AI can replace the author, the artist, the journalist, the strategist, the researcher, the consultant; whether it can replace us.
In the Arthur C. Clark novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hal, the onboard AI assistant, ominously says, “I don’t want to insist on it, Dave, but I am incapable of making an error.”
As humans, we are ultimately set apart by our flaws. Our imperfections, curiosities, desires, dreams, fears, and feelings, are some of the consequences of possessing some form of consciousness.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. What is interesting is that the verb used is not ‘create,’ but ‘generate.’ To produce something, for now, AI requires a prompt from a human, some form of question or request. And so, being the prompters, we become makers via our words.
If AI has all the answers, perhaps being human will mean having all the questions, especially the ones that cannot be answered.
What it means to be human, by Oliver Sacks:
“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
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