What is intelligence and who (or what) has it?  A century ago, this was a question for gray bearded philosophers. Today it’s one of the most pressing issues facing human society.  The rapid spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies poses enormous possibilities and perils. What’s most dangerous, however, is the hype surrounding AI from people who stand to make a shitload of money if they can worm it into every facet of our daily lives. 

Facing down this hype and figuring out how to deal with AI is going to be really important in getting through the next few decades with our humanity intact.  That’s because what’s really at stake is a boots-on-the ground understanding of what it means to be human. 

This is a topic I plan on exploring a lot in Everyman’s Universe (and it’s also the topic of a new long form piece I just published in Noema Magazine).  I love science, and the I love the technological miracles it makes possible (don’t even think about taking my video games away). 

Below the actual practice of science, however, are a bunch of ideas that claim to speak for science.   We pick them up in high school classes and get sold them via lots of popular science writing and videos.  One of these ideas says you - with all your experiences, emotions and sensations - are “nothing but” a bunch of neurons and their electrical activity.  According to this idea you’re really just a computer made out of meat and everything about you, everything that makes up your life, can be reduced to the brain and its neural computations. 

For those who hold to this kind of “reductionism” (that’s the idea’s philosophical label) science tells us we are meat computers inhabiting biological robot bodies. 

Bullshit.

Science does not say anything of the kind.  Instead, reductionism is just a philosophical position, a bias, that some people believe in.  It’s an add-on to what happens in scientific investigations about life and cognition and consciousness.  There are lots of other philosophical positions you can hold which will match the scientific data just as well. 

Why does this matter?  The billionaires who want to shove their AI technologies down our throats (for their own profit) want you to believe that really soon their creations will achieve “ Super-Intelligence”.  They tell us these thinking machines will be so powerful that we should give much of the workings of human society over to their care.  I say this is a dangerous fantasy.   

As remarkable as these machines are (and they are remarkable) they bear no resemblance to the only thing we know of that actually displays intelligence i.e. Life.

There is a deep and profound difference between life and machines.  A lot of our future, and the ability to retain our humanity, will depend on recognizing that difference.  God help us if we screw it up.

I will leave it there for today.  If you want a deeper dive right now, check out that Noema Magazine article I wrote.  Most of all though, just remember… No meat computers!

— Adam Frank 🚀