We Cannot Return And Recover As Humans; We Can Only Transcend As Human Beings

The AI Wild West show, which is hovering up all the personal data, not to mention all knowledge, is out of control. The latest iteration is using AI to bring back and whitewash Adolf Hitler for social media consumption, in English or any language.

Meanwhile, California’s slick governor just vetoed an AI safety bill after the tech industry raised objections. Gavin Newsom explained his decision in the best doublespeak by saying he wanted to “develop workable guardrails” that focus “on developing an empirical, science-based trajectory analysis.” In other words, the tech bros in California, which hosts 32 of the world’s 50 leading AI companies, bore down on him until he caved.

In response, a smarmy venture capitalist named Marc Andreessen wrote: “Thank you Gavin Newsom for vetoing SB1047 – for siding with California dynamism, economic growth, and freedom to compute, over safetyism, doomerism, and decline.” In other words, ignore the icebergs, full steam ahead!

In an essay entitled, “The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think,” Shannon Vallor skims the surface of the challenge by appealing to humanism and hope: “Maybe the moral and experiential poverty of AI will bring the most vitally human dimensions of our native intelligence back to the center of our attention and foster a cultural reclamation and restoration of their long-depreciated value.”

What planet is she living on? Vallor stands atop the last rampart of humanism and proclaims the greatness of being human without considering what it means to be a human being.

Humanism has been defined as “a system of thought centered on the notion of the rational, autonomous self and ignoring the unintegrated and conditioned nature of the individual.”

Vallor makes the claims and aims of her humanistic agenda clear. “Native intelligence” at “the center of our attention” in order to “foster a cultural reclamation and restoration” are phrases that ring as hollow as a broken drum. Not only is “cultural restoration and reclamation” a fantasy, but the richness and diversity that implicitly defined what it meant to be human, for good or ill, are unrecoverable. We need to ask what it means to be a human being in the world as it is, not how to restore humanness in the world as it was.

“It is precisely when a technology has nearly supplanted a vital domain of human meaning that we are able to feel and mourn what has been taken from us,” Vallor intones. “It is at that moment that we often begin to resist, reclaim and rededicate ourselves to its value.”

What exactly has been taken from us that the vast majority of “consumers” have not willingly exchanged for the comforts and pleasures of materialism, the conjoined twin of the mechanism?

“In an era that rewards and recognizes only mechanical thinking, can humans still remember and reclaim what we are?”

That’s a wrong question, since “remembering and reclaiming” don’t begin to address the depth of the crisis of consciousness that AI, along with the planetary ecological collapse are generating. What is the point trying to remember and reclaim what we were as humans before we fragmented the planet and the world all to hell misusing the evolutionary gift of “higher thought,” which we’re now replicating with AI?

Besides, why would we expect to use AI any more wisely than we have used thought to this point, with all the thousands of wars, extreme economic disparity, and ecological decimation the human mind has wrought? AI cannot be more intelligent than humans are, and people who believe it will save us without radically changing ourselves are deluding themselves.

Vallor’s target is an AI expert who “refuses to grant that humans are more than task machines executing computational scripts and issuing the statistically expected tokens.”

According to this view, she says, “characterizations of human beings as acting wisely, playfully, inventively, insightfully, meditatively, courageously, compassionately or justly are no more than poetic license.” With the exception of acting playfully with their children however, that is the poetic license.

Attacking “superhuman” AI ideology is a straw man. The real target is capitalism and the present structure of global society, which has erased and devalued not just the concept of a “human,” but eroded the topsoil of our ancient humanness. For tens of thousands of years humans were embedded in tradition, culture, religion and language. Now we’re anchored only in the ‘’me,’ in my “agency” and my pursuits and pleasures.

Therefore the hope of “returning and reclaiming our humanness” is not just misguided; it’s purblind. We cannot return to our indigenous or pre-industrial past anymore than we can return to our childhoods.

Recovering the child and growing as a human being entails facing and attending to the accretions of conditioning and experience that occlude and preclude unmediated perception and childlike innocence.

In the same way, humankind cannot return to some idea and ideal of wholeness in the past, but can only bring forth and bring insight and understanding into the human condition as it is.

Though we have irrecoverably lost much of the human richness and diversity of the past, living humans now have no choice but to transform ourselves, or we will become completely deracinated things in merging with our machines.

The challenge AI poses is much deeper than to our “concepts of ourselves as humans,” or to a humanistic ideal and image of bygone humans. AI is accelerating the crisis of human consciousness that was already well underway before ChatGPT.

What is the core difference between a human being and even the smartest and fastest artificial general intelligence of the future?

AI is a thing ineluctably of thought, and can never have an insight. Insight comes not from thought, or connecting nodes of knowledge. That is AI’s domain now.

Insight comes in the spaces between thoughts, and the silence of the mind. That is the true ground in which human beings grow.

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