[Surreal] Reactions to "Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI", part 6 (Rodney Brooks)
Or: technology changes people, so be careful what you wish for
(Title image: Kant the Philosopher, in his usual thinking mode. Public domain image.)
Brooks's score card on hyped predictions (the most recent version here) is savage, in the sense that it is brutally honest and realistic. So I opened the chapter with great expectations. Lo and behold, Mr. Brooks delivered yet again!
He cut straight to the chase: technology is never technology in itself. It never stays in its shell as a tool to be used. Instead, human beings are being manipulated by these tools and technologies, and more things need to be done to rectify the damage already incurred and to preempt potential future failures. He made these points by criticizing Wiener, a bit harsh IMO: predicting the future is very hard, so give Wiener a pass!
While concurring with most of his points, I wish that he could go deeper and drive the roosters home to croak the two points:
communications between human and the tools are as important as tools themselves, and
how tools interact with humans has a profound and deep impact of human behaviors, individual and collective.
As Marshall McLuhan pointed out many years ago, technology (and all media) is merely an extension of human beings. For this reason, treating technology as seriously as we'd treat other human beings, is an ethical imperative. This position comes up right against what Daniel Dennett proposed in chapter 4: a philosopher, of all people, thought that technology is "just technology" in the sense that they are tools and not people --- and why'd we care about tools as much as we care about people?
Would Kant be turning in his grave? I'd imagine a bespectacled Kant, irate, putting on some secular and plain language for us to understand his wrath and frustration: “Did y'all just toss out the window all formulations of the categorical imperative? Now are we treating human beings as means to an end, not an end to itself? What nonsense!”
To sum up what Brooks said in this chapter with a slight Kantian bend: AI should not be leading human beings down the path of treating each other as a means to an end. Instead, AI has the potential to enhance and rebuild social constructs, so human beings can be treated as an end in itself.
But there is an unanswered question here. It is a question so deeply ingrained in the presumptions of all authors so far, that nobody bothered to look it in the eyes and answer it. With supersmart AI and abundance of means, would we finally be able to get along with each other? I don't have an answer to it. I wonder if any of the authors have thought of it at all.
Next up: Reactions to part 7, a chapter by Nobel laureate in Physics, Frank Wilczek.