“[...] humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature – the only ones whose behaviour cannot be understood without understanding everything of fundamental importance.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
As AI becomes increasingly more of an influence in many realms of life at higher speeds than expected - whether we are thinking about loss of jobs and the ripple effects of that into the economy, or tech addiction and the belief-behavior manipulation that AI is capable of, there are new realms of exploration that will also become important to us.
This is especially the case if we wish to create conditions for ourselves that will sustain us into the future in terms of jobs/work, lifestyle, mental health and Human Thriving.
The beauty of Artificial Intelligence is that it pushes us to also more deeply understand the nature of Intelligence itself.
What is intelligence and how are humans set apart from other species and machines?* As physicist David Deutsch says, we are universal constructors - our intelligence is generalized and generalizable - making us capable of adapting to any corner of any ecosystem.
*(I’ll be covering the concept of intelligence in an upcoming episode)
Intelligence is a complex notion. Marvin Minsky, an AI pioneer, in a 1998 interview with Edge, talked about intelligence as a "suitcase word":
“all of us use these [terms] to encapsulate our jumbled ideas about our minds. We use those words as suitcases in which to contain all sorts of mysteries that we can’t yet explain.”
Like a suitcase that's packed full of many different things, some are related, some aren't. Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe institute also reflects this In a SFI podcast series on intelligence:
“there's no single thing that intelligence is. It's a whole bunch of different capabilities and ways of being that perhaps are not just one single thing that you could either have more of or less of or get to the level of something. It's much more of a complex notion. There's a lot of different hallmarks that people think of when they think of intelligence”
The more we talk about intelligence the more we might see a few key themes emerge...
- That humans are still pretty special in terms of what we are able to do with our minds and bodies;
- That the word intelligence is a ‘suitcase word’ and that it is such a complex notion that even trying to define it helps us explore our own and others’ paradigms and capacities for complex perspectives;
- That the body and embodied intelligence are massively important and often ignored a missing from many explorations about intelligence;
- The more we talk about complexity and explore the Nature of Intelligence, the better chance me have at designing Systems and Environments that actually facilitate on highest capacities for learning, resilience and adaptation
Our human intelligence, unlike AI, is embodied… it is enfleshed and interacts with sensory-motor, visceral-kinesthetic, skeleto-muscular systems.
Conversely, AI can only use the inputs we - as humans- give it for how it learns (at least currently).
Even the highest definition 3D rendering doesn't have smell, taste, texture or pressure..
The inputs AI works with is not the actual visceral, in-the-body-experience. There are no internal bodily fluctuations of heart rhythms, ears ringing, cheeks flushing, skin electrifying experiences that it lives.
It only gets our translations of those as words, code and images.
This means that its data is 'one layer out’ from our actual experience.
It is in the symbolic realm - where the actual sensations of life have been translated into the best attempts we have to convey them. But symbols aren't the experience. They can only represent the experience. What is fed into the pool of data for AI doesn’t include smell, texture, heat, pressure, etc. A picture or description of a windy or rainy day doesn’t contain the movement, feel of wind, rain, the variety of smells that get stirred up.
AI relies on what we feed into it. And what we feed into it is not our actual visceral experiences, but how we interpret them, what we notice and how we take all that and try to put all that into words and images.
Humans perceive what HUMANS perceive through the vibrational and sensory mechanisms we have in our tissues and organs.
We then do our best to translate those experiences.
Not only will those translations be imperfect, they will only be based on what we NOTICE.
There are FREQUENCIES that coexist with us at every moment we are completely unaware of and therefore are not capable of being inputted into a digital system. AI can only work with the limitations we ourselves have on representing and conveying our own experiences.
There are also PERSPECTIVES that we are also completely unaware of and that are therefore also not capable of being inputted into a digital system.
This means that what AI uses to form its own intelligence is disconnected from our deepest, most visceral and sensory, mammalian and flesh-based existence.
What this means for us is that we must truly get to KNOW OURSELVES… who we truly are as embodied, intelligent beings... how we use our bodies, minds and sensations to adapt constantly - in ways that help us align with how we truly want to FEEL and experience life inside our bodies..
AI is a topic that matters to ALL OF US whether we realize it or not.
Because it IS real. And there is an intelligence to it that can help us in powerful ways, and can have detrimental effects beyond what we can currently even imagine. As Mathilde states in an interview with KidsAI:
“for the first time, machines can interact with us in ways that sound human. This directly taps into human vulnerabilities, as we are prone to this bias and often quickly forget that we are not interacting with a human being.” - Dr. Mathilde Cerioli
The Problem with Counterfeit People
This anthropomorphism is one of the key areas of concern for Dr. Mathilde Cerioli, as well as other other experts. We might trust AI with things that it shouldn’t have agency over, and we are seeing negative impacts from this.
As the late philosopher Daniel Dennett states in his article "The Problem with Counterfeit People",
"Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created."
In this episode, Dr. Mathilde Cerioli, Chief Scientist at everyone.ai and I explore ideas of trust, emotional manipulation and other impacts of AI on human development.
Mathilde holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Master's Degree in Psychology, with a strong focus on child development. Her research focuses on the intersection of AI and child cognitive and socio-emotional development. She is the Chief Scientific Officer at everyone.AI, a nonprofit focused on educating about the opportunities and risks of AI for children. Within everyone.ai and in partnership with the Paris Peace Forum, she contributed to the launch of the Beneficial AI for Children Coalition, a multistakeholder initiative that aims to orient the development, deployment and adoption of beneficial AI for children and adolescents, working with 11 governments, tech companies, and large organizations and NGOs, such as UNICEF, UNESCO and Common Sense Media.
In our conversation, we touch on what artificial intelligence is, and what kind of impact we are seeing it have particularly in the realm of how it can negatively impact human learning, behavior and the negative impacts it can have on mental health especially for young people.
As she states:
one of the big concerns with some of the AI programs we are seeing now is that it can create an extremely "highly engaged ‘parasocial’ relationship with someone", but... they are now interacting "with an entity that lacks reciprocity at critical moments...”
This type of dynamic is particularly dangerous for yougn people, whose brains are still developing.
Another key part of conversation is that Mathilde highlights one of the biggest misunderstandings she sees with many learning apps and gamifications: they seem to assume that they need to make learning more fun by adding prizes, points, rewards, etc. When in fact, as she asserts, learning and mastery are inherently rewarding ..
Change can often be facilitated by ‘better questions’...
A 'better' (more nuanced, systems-oriented) question to be asking, potentially, is whether these apps and games actually facilitate learning. Or, are they designed with a similar goal as many other apps: to keep people engaged on the app.
Not only is it important for us to think about the GOAL of what people are designing Al to do, we can also ask:
- Who are the humans behind the algorithms and programs being designed?
- What are their experiences and backgrounds?
- What kind of exposure have they had to the vast spectrum of human cultures, and developmental insights?
AI isn’t going anywhere. It will only get more sophisticated and prevalent in our world. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
We can use this incredible technology for enormous good. What it pushes us to do now, is to understand - as deeply and with as much curiosity as we can - what we truly need to thrive as individuals and as a collective. It presents an opportunity for us to dive into what makes humans special, intelligent, curious and connected
“In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.”
― Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
References (please also see hyperlinks in the above article for resources):
Deutsch, D. (2011). The beginning of infinity: Explanations that transform the world. New York: Viking.
Minsky, M. (1986). The society of mind. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.
Poole, D. L., & Mackworth, A. K. (2023). Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
