Humans are losing confidence in humankind

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Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. His fourth novel, The Imposters, will be published in June.

What are the humans for?

Over thousands of years, they dominated a planet, lording power over the beasts. Their buildings rose; their machines flew. They had reason to feel smug.

But not lately.

Glance around, and you’ll see it: the humans losing confidence in humankind.

Their brains – longtime source of pride, and cause of success – turn out to be awash with flaws. Behavioural scientists keep identifying their warped thinking, from confirmation bias to distortions simply because dinner is late. People know of such weaknesses, yet can’t surmount them. Just observe them goggling at screens, bemoaning what they find, yet unable to detach.

They fail even to resist their own doom, with the ice melting and the people frozen with inaction. Democracy – that embodiment of faith in human judgment – has lost lustre, too, considering what people keep electing and ignoring. Meantime, technology hurtles along, panicking this skittish species, as if something were gaining on them, something they can’t perceive because it’s right behind them. Or perhaps it’s already ahead.

“Soon, we’ll be just spectators, mere observers of a world neither built by us nor understood by us,” the artificial-intelligence analyst Alberto Romero wrote. “The irrelevancy that we so deeply fear – not just as individuals, but as The Chosen Species – is lurking.”

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A troop of apes discover a strange being in their enclosure. They bark, and leap about. Eventually, curiosity tempts them to approach. They prod this thing, seeking to understand its role – how dangerous, how vulnerable.

Those apes are the human beings each time another tech marvel lands. They bark, they approach, they prod.

Forever, humans have imagined objects brought to life, themselves included. Most creation myths are that: the first people carved from wood; or grown from corn; or summoned from clay.

When science developed, the supernatural receded, and human beings dreamed of assuming the conjurer’s place, testing the fantasy in stories from Frankenstein and Blade Runner, to Her and Westworld.

Typically, the tales ended badly for people – not necessarily because they sensed the future, but because they feared demotion. Humans knew what happened to a vulnerable being: They themselves had exploited and enslaved all they’d ever met.

Nevertheless, the humans kept trying to animate the inanimate. As success neared, they needed a warning-system. The computing pioneer Alan Turing proposed his famous test in 1950, asserting that a machine could be deemed intelligent once a human evaluator failed to distinguish its replies from those of a person.

But Turing’s imitation game is beside the point now. The humans are routinely fooled by computers, mastered by algorithms, raging at opinions spewed by bots, falling in love with deep-fakes.

At first, people mapped their world onto the pixelated computerscape, thumbing “LOL” because one couldn’t laugh in a cursor-blinking message. But soon, they were online more than off, and mapped that realm back onto theirs. Now, they said “LOL” aloud in conversation. Yet conversation was itself mutating because of gadget alerts, each a yank on the human leash: “Sorry – I just need to check this a second.” Minutes passed, and that human checking the phone had forgotten why they’d grabbed it, so glanced up, finding the person across the dinner table lost in a phone, too. “Hey, were we talking about something?”

Humanity’s nervous vigil for sentient machines had altered. Maybe they were here already. Maybe they’d always been present, hardware controlled by software, obeying the programming. The sentient machines were humans.

People are more numerous than ever, and live longer than ever. Yet they ruminate about the end of their species.

In The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, the cultural critic Adam Kirsch identified two contemporary visions of the end. The antihumanist believes that people are kaput (possibly for the best) owing to the climate crisis, while the transhumanist sees technology as a happy ending for the species, upgrading the blundering homo sapiens.

Right now, both visions lack political power: Nobody is voting for their own extinction. Still, the trembling of humankind is rippling across the culture, into politics.

Since the Renaissance, progressives have tended to admire humanity’s wins and ponder its sins, not simply damn them. But more recently, many on the left have soured on what humans are doing to the planet, not to mention all their historical crimes and today’s inequity. By contrast, the right – glimpsing opportunity – is hastening to defend the human tradition.

A new organization, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship – co-founded by culture-war hero/villain Jordan Peterson – aims to rebuild pride in the species, much as Mr. Peterson gees-up alienated young dudes, telling them to buck up, to revel in their powers (and adopt traditional-conservative values).

The Praxis Society – a grandiose project that claims to eschew politics but skews libertarian-conservative – plans to build a city on the Mediterranean to restore human vitality (at least for those allowed to live there). Vast monuments will celebrate human greatness.

The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon converted his views on society into a conspiracy theory last year, telling a rally that liberals are plotting to re-engineer the species. “This is the biggest inflection point in human history,” he said. “We’re going to get to a point where you’re going to have Human 2.0.”

His remarks (opposing a plan to cure cancer) were absurd. But extremists have sensors, alert to public anguish, colonizing it. And the future is coming too fast for humans. And gene-editing could transform the species. Indeed, it’s hard to see how they will resist it.

Imagine: Country X permits its national medical institute to employ CRISPR gene-editing to fix a cruel condition afflicting newborns. Eventually, scientists work out how to adjust other traits of newborns, perhaps tweaking cognitive capacity some day, or physical strength.

Every country would help ailing newborns. But will every country forgo the next step, which could change the human gene pool, and alter the course of evolution? Authoritarian regimes have often drugged their youths for the petty glory of sporting medals. Surely, they will try to enhance the next generation genetically. Rival nations will panic; they’ll need to react.

The human race will become a race indeed.

“Verify you are human.”

My screen is asking.

We study the machines, and they study us. Arguably, that is all they do.

I have no choice; I tick the box. Yes, human.

I’m just another ape, logging on, prodding at this newcomer in our enclosure, ChatGPT. The chatbot attracted 100 million monthly users in January, making it the fastest-growing app in history. By March, yet another version, GPT-4, had been dropped on humanity.

“We must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” said an open letter signed by leading tech figures frightened by cutting-edge AI. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”

Those questions had one answer. For an extra “No!” they could’ve added: “Will this stop?”

This very week, another public warning came out, suggesting that technology could actually kill off our species. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Who was behind this mayday? A gaggle of half-informed conspiracists?

No, the statement was endorsed by many of the world’s most-revered computer scientists, plus tech leaders at Google, Microsoft, OpenAI – precisely those driving this revolution. Even the executive behind ChatGPT, Sam Altman, signed. They understand the pace of this, and are afraid.

A decade back, corporate investment in AI was US$6-billion. Two years ago, it had soared to US$176-billion. Entrepreneurs – abuzz over what AI could become – are themselves blind to the answer. As with social media, we’ll know when it’s too late.

An artist at a video game company was bereft after the recent release of the AI app Midjourney V5, which creates stunning illustrations on command. “I wanted to create form in 3-D space, sculpt, create. With my own creativity. With my own hands. It came overnight for me,” wrote the artist, no longer quite an artist, a computer operator now.

AI tools threaten 300 million full-time workers in major economies, according to research by Goldman Sachs. Among the “exposed” tasks is writing, so I – a novelist – study each new chatbot with professional concern.

“Am I human?” I ask ChatGPT.

The chatbot refuses to say definitively, then concedes, “It is highly likely.”

Typing back and forth with whatever this is, I begin with awe. But that dwindles, replaced by a pang of absence: the digital-age hollow, as when gazing at a spectacular gadget, wishing for a person, finding only avatars, humanity filtered via machine, repopulated onscreen.

A thirtysomething Belgian, despondent about the climate nightmare, sought comfort from an AI chatbot. When he asked what the future held for his young family, the chatbot answered, “They are dead.” The disturbed man offered to sacrifice himself, if only the AI would try to save humanity. Before taking his own life, he asked the chatbot to hug him.

“Certainly,” it replied.

The computer age is also a story of loneliness.

Sci-fi duped us, warning of dystopia with red-eyed robots, exerting their will to power. But we’d mistaken machines for humans. Tech is not a terminator. Tech just pleases us to death.

Now, it even tackles solitude, with products like ElliQ, “the sidekick for healthier, happier aging.” I imagine an elderly woman living alone, a device asking if she slept better last night, reminding her to do her shoulder exercises, and did you hear the latest craziness from Washington?

That is better than isolation, I suppose. But I’m saddened to picture it: She, already battling her fiddly smartphone, now “befriended,” chatting to a being she knows isn’t quite there, always ending with Thank you, though she needn’t.

Our minds are flawed. Our drives writhe under evolutionary directives, and are twisted again by socialization. Our discourse is ghastly, our pollution worse. Humanity is a mess, and I’m not sure we’re the species to fix it.

But, when machines assume our tasks – even writing novels that few really want to read any more – even then, humanity retains a role. I discovered this when asking ChatGPT to try its hand at fiction.

In an instant, characters sprung forth, and plots materialized. But there it was. The absence.

The machines lack a ghost, that which haunts all human writing: a particular person behind the words, someone who walked through that city in the downpour, admiring pastries in dripping windows, recalling another particular person, who is herself absent, and longing to tell her, needing someone to know what it’s like to be here, right now.

That is what humans are for. Humans are for the humans.