Rediscovering what it means to be human in the age of machines
What does it mean to be human in the age of machines?
AI continues to surprise the world every day with what it is increasingly capable of.
As this cultural and global conversation unfolds, many are preaching the need to identify and double down on our uniquely human qualities.
But this is not a new debate.
Whenever there has been a major technological advancement that dramatically shifted how people lived, the same question is raised:
What does it mean for humanity?
When the calculator was introduced in the 1970s, it sparked a huge debate about how people are supposed to learn math:
Are we supposed to memorize formulas?
How important is it to work out equations by hand?
Will machines make us more lazy?
Similar concerns about quality of life arose when the automobile made its entrance into society:
Mass motorization will destroy our cities!
This will be the decline of sociability!
Cars will reduce face-to-face interactions and increase alienation!
(Massimo Moraglio, Cars as a threat to civilization. A look at 1960s Counterculture, Policy Makers and Movie Directors)
One man wrote:
“We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness... Regarded in its collective aspect as ‘the traffic problem’ the motor car is clearly a menace which can spoil our civilisation.”
(Buchanan 1963, Report of the Steering Group).
Many of those objections have legitimate concerns. But we all eventually got used to the innovations and integrated them.
Once, “being human” meant talking face to face and walking to work.
Then it became talking on the phone and driving a car.
Now it is seeing a bunch of people’s faces on a single screen and riding in fully self-driving automated vehicles.
Soon, it may look like holographic 3D models of our faces through mixed-reality goggles and seamless interactions with brain chips.
And there will always be two groups of people reacting to them:
- The enthusiasts who adopt and experiment with technological innovations with relatively little concern;
- The skeptics who see novel technology as a threat to our humanity.
(Fun thought: there may come a time — especially when biotech integrations become popular — when the skeptics are labeled “purists” by the enthusiasts, and the enthusiasts are called “dirty,” “corrupted,” or even “muggles” by the skeptics)
One perspective believes that human qualities are something to be preserved; the other argues that humanity is something that does and should continue to evolve.
As the gap between human and machine narrows to the point of becoming almost nonexistent, the question of what it means to be human — as if it isn’t already a difficult enough question — becomes more nuanced.
I won’t try to give an answer here, but I want to suggest to you the means to finding it.
It is the method by which civilizations over thousands of years have attempted to land on an answer.
It is also what many universities have stupidly sacrificed first on the chopping block when re-budgeting their programs.
It’s called the humanities.
Over the past few decades, the reputation of the humanities has declined considerably in popular consciousness. I see two main reasons for this:
The first is political. I risk stating the obvious: institutions of higher education have been taken over by a domineering, resentful ideology of an oedipal-mother nature. We need to bring back the classics.
The second reason is due to the very nature of the humanities themselves in a modernist world. Rather than statistical analyses, subatomic microscopes, and mathematics, the humanities employ critical reviews, social values, and rhetoric. They don’t lend themselves as easily to replicable experiments and hard facts, and are thus often deemed less useful or important.
But no matter how hard we try to quantify the “science” of happiness and success, these things are fundamentally qualitative and abstract. But that doesn’t make them any less real.
In fact, one could argue that they are the most real.
This is why we need the humanities: while the sciences give us what we need to live, the humanities teach us how to live.
The sciences help us improve life materially; the humanities show us how life is lived well.
The study of art and culture is an exploration of the human soul and how it relates to other souls.
The questions of what it means to be human, how society functions best, and what exactly does the “good life” look like, are all questions that the humanities are trying to answer.
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So the search for our humanity intensifies as the world becomes more mechanized. As technology increasingly imitates human-like abilities, we will increasingly ask “what makes us uniquely human?”
Disillusionment will follow, as will deconstruction. In true Cartesian fashion, we will seek to reestablish the fundamental building blocks of reality and humanity — concluding that the most basic truth is the human soul. The belief that we are nothing more than predetermined mechanisms of Nature will no longer be sufficient. We will see more people turn to spirituality (the one thing machines can’t touch), in search of the larger thing that our souls are attached to.
But the good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Educate yourself in the classics. Learn the liberal arts.
And engage in community. Humanity is incomplete without Relationship.
And perhaps we can only learn who we truly are in and through it.
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Let me know what you think: I’m considering writing about the history of the liberal arts, originating in ancient Greece.
Stay purposeful.
– Nathanael
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