I recently listened to Yuval Harari’s interview on the Ezra Klein show, which (in a super-paraphrased, condensed version that I did not even refer back to the original audio to create) featured this delightful sequence of argument:
YH: The world is soon to be overtaken by some form of AI, not because it will necessarily physically overwhelm us, but because humanity’s increasing uselessness in the face of technological progress will just continue spiraling until we no longer value human beings as such — until we stop investing in their development or economic utility. The machines don’t have to become all-knowing, or conscious, or even particularly powerful, just good enough to push our human value off the economic margins until we dwindle in the market and give way to them, eventually, by rather natural capitalist forces.
EK: But supposing humanity’s value isn’t the same as its utility? What if we just continue fabricating purposes for ourselves after machines price us out of all the industries they can? After all, everything we do is a story — religion is a story, the Constitution is a story, human rights are a story, the economy is a story, money itself is a story, the value of a bottle of wine is a story — so what’s to keep us from inventing a story that attributes value to ourselves that machines can’t take away? We simply invent a need for people that only people can fill, and keep the economy going forward at the speed of our imaginations.
Which Yuval Harari hemmed and hawed on a bit, and didn’t have a particularly satisfying answer for, by my estimation.
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Which is to say nothing about the theory that machines grow intelligent enough to eat us alive with giant robot jaws (!) — but just keeping the focus on collapsing human utility for a moment.
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The truly terrific thing implied at the bottom of this is a coming creative crisis. When we have stripped human beings of their traditional values in favor of machines, we might only be at the threshold of a massive revision of our moral, economic, philosophic playbook. When economics no longer compels us to value each other by the traditional metrics, when we have to invent new purposes for ourselves to continue justifying our existence, what might we ascribe as the non-displaceable value of human activity? As we lose our comparative mechanistic utility, how will we define our anti-mechanical values?
As a moral relativist, figures to me that we can make anything holy we put our minds to.
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Sex. Ayahuasca trips. Biological byproducts. Performative pain. Extracted sections of the genetic script. Unconscious thoughts. Speaking in tongues. [Post-edit: there’s usually an SMBC on point]
Dollah, dollah bills.
At some point, even, maybe — funding for the arts!