Putting the Human Back Into Humanity

The director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute issued a dire warning: Artificial intelligence (AI) developments constitute an existential threat to all humanity as we know it. Machines are being designed that will vastly exceed human intelligence and be able to “shape the future according to their preference.” The Globe and Mail’s interview with him was titled “The Invention that May Wipe Us Out.”

Recently, Ezra Klein of the New York Times quoted a 2022 survey in which AI experts agreed that the probability of human ability to control future advanced AI systems is virtually non-existent.

They are not speaking about science fiction. AI goes beyond writing sophisticated software to “deep learning” in which computers can teach themselves new tasks.

The benefits of technology are numerous and acknowledged. We live more comfortable and advanced lives now than ever before. But all change is not progress and not everything that can be done should be done.

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s futuristic novel “Klara and the Sun” foresees a time when robots are bought as personal companions. At the end of the novel, after the death of her child, a bereaved mother is consoled with the presence of her daughter’s robot, who has adopted the character of the daughter.

Is humanity unwittingly creating a new pagan god, made not of stone or wood but of circuits and wires? Are we coming full circle from paganism to ethical monotheism only to return to a new paganism? An ironic, dark parody of Darwinian evolution?

How do we put the human back into humanity? How can one prevent the god of technology from creating whatever it wants just because it can?

Contrast that picture of an inhuman future of amoral machines, a mechanistic and soulless life, with the Jewish view of the world of covenant as described in the Bible, a belief that humans are created in the image of God and who have innate dignity, purpose and meaning.

Ethical monotheism and its attendant moral responsibility are an alternative to this dystopian development.

Covenant, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks defines it, means that the individual has a mission in life that is dedicated to responsibility for oneself and for others based on moral considerations. The individual has liberty based on ethical principles and is dedicated to combating injustice. The human spirit has the power to accomplish great feats for the benefit of all humankind.

Rabbi Sacks explains further that “one of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.”

The Catholic historian Paul Johnson wrote that “Jews gave the world ethical monotheism, which might be described as the application of reason to divinity. Jewish history teaches that there is a purpose to human existence … in continuing to give meaning to creation.”

Even the secular world recognizes the great need for the human element in these times.

David Brooks notes in the NYT that what is missing in AI is a humanistic core: “It does not spring from a person’s imagination, bursts of insight, anxiety and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity” and so, in showing us what it can’t do, it “reveals who we are and what we have to offer.” He concludes with a wish that we appreciate humanistic knowledge “that leaves people wiser and transformed.”

Art humanizes the beholder as well, he argues in a separate article, in that “it trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way,” widens your emotional repertoire and yields “emotional knowledge” by teaching us to see the world through the eyes of another.

We must resolve to rediscover the value of the humanities and the human in a world desperately in need of recovering our sense of purpose and our sense of self.

Perhaps now we can understand why MIT, the university renowned world-wide for its engineering program, requires “a substantial and varied program in the humanities, arts and social sciences” and considers this “an essential part of the education of every undergraduate.”

All engineering programs would do well to follow their example. MIT understands that students need an education, not training. And never more so than now, when the mechanical threatens the human, when technology overwhelms the individual. Who better to learn from than the world’s premier engineering school about the importance of a humanities education?

If we are powerless to prevent this new and fast-developing revolution, we can use this moment to focus on what distinguishes us from the man-made genesis, to turn our attention from artificial intelligence to human intelligence, with all of its experience, emotion, creativity and potential.

The ethics and moral responsibility of religious tradition and the human and aesthetic dimension of the arts have never been more relevant.

Gandhi listed seven sins of the world. One of them is science without humanity. We must resolve to rediscover the value of the humanities and the human in a world desperately in need of recovering our sense of purpose and our sense of self.

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.