HI and the Grand Canyon

 

COULD THE GRAND CANYON TRAIN HUMAN-HEALTHY AI?

My comments stimulated by J. Winterson’s essay (see down below) from 11/12/23 “Guardian” book section, essays on AI:

Should we not call this AI, not alternative, but inorganic-based or non-organic-based, intelligence: IBI, NOBI, …? The major point JW makes, with which I fully agree (and it is never more clear than during the present war horrors, is that our meat-based intelligence, grounded on our planet-wide male-dominance-developed world, is a failure. It is not a question of whether “we” will destroy ourselves, our world:— we DO, ARE, HAVE, destroy, destroying, destroyed. And even though we know what to do to avoid various complete destructions, we go on destroying it; making heating-up choices, for instance affecting the world’s weather systems, many of us glorying in our ability to sneer at predictions,, making up alternative fictions to allow us to continue doing just as we are, as we please. 

Obviously, I agree with Winterson “not being thrilled”. Our behavior is destructive. We do not have to wipe the earth clean of life to look at, and react with horror at, what we have done and do on an on-going basis as far as death and destruction (and cheering it on) of humans and the current planetary environment and its creatures, are concerned. 

On the one hand, this is just the theory of species using up its resources until the final crash. On the other, there could be something like Le Guin’s Earth in Always Coming Home: — In some places, mighty fortresses of NOBI accomplishment; in others, some “tribal”-sized human settlements that pick and choose their tools based on health, comfort, interest, longevity, and other such modest qualities. Of course that Earth comes about only after cataclysm…

And what does this have to do with the Grand Canyon? On the one hand, there is the obvious point that I believe leaving the Canyon alone, un-man-marred, to be, and change in its ways, and go on, is a worthwhile goal, more worthwhile than building dams and carbon-based powerplants and industrial tourist sites that only facilitate our male-based destroying systems.

On the other, were we to able to change and seek solutions to our destructiveness, the Canyon would, does, stand as a reminder, an icon, of the meaningfulness of the world that hominids — up until a few millennia ago — evolved in. And that includes accepting longevity of a healthy environment as an over-riding human activity. 

One marker of such health would be a restored Colorado Plateau and River system, all the exploitations undone; humans living in its environments only within its parameters. Perhaps, indeed, such humans being guided by precepts derived from the best behaviors of all the many cultures that flourished here, and possibly thus being able to continue on to see even more healthy, supportive, long-lived environments.

And here is what Winterson wrote:

In my book of essays about life with AI – moving from Mary Shelley’s 1818 vision of a man-made humanoid to the possibilities of the metaverse – I describe AI not as artificial intelligence but alternative intelligence.

I am not thrilled with where Homo sapiens has landed us, and I believe we are at the point where we evolve or wipe out ourselves, and the planet. There is no reason to believe that the last 300,000 years mark us out as a species that is fully evolved. Our behaviour suggests the opposite. I would like to see a transhuman, eventually a post-human, future where intelligence and consciousness are no longer exclusively housed in a substrate made of meat. After all, that has been the promise of every world religion.

I was brought up in a strict religious household, and it intrigues me that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: is consciousness obliged to materiality? Religion has always said no. Scientific materialism has said yes. And now? It’s getting interesting.

As a fiction writer, I know we should avoid apocalyptic thinking. The way we live is not a law, like gravity; it is propositional. We make it up as we go along. We can change the story because we are the story. This is freedom. It is also responsibility. What story shall we tell about who humans are? Warlike, violent, dishonest, wasteful? That’s part of us, certainly. It’s not the whole story – and I don’t want it to be the story that ends life on Earth. The last thing I am worrying about right now is whether AI will write better fiction than humans. I don’t care.

I would love to work with AI on a piece of fiction. We could share the royalties, and the AI money could fund more women to get involved in AI research and application. The real problem is not that AI is writing, or will write, or can write. The problem is who is writing the AI programs and designing the algorithms. Who is setting the terms of the research? Who is deciding what matters? Mainly men. That’s a problem because the world is not made up of mainly men.

For centuries men wrote our literature, our history, our travelogues, our philosophy. Virginia Woolf was not on the curriculum for my Oxford degree because she was not deemed to be of sufficient merit.

The great thing about AI is that it need not be gendered – why should it be? It has no biological sex. This could be the start of a true non-binary, non race-based, faith-wars-irrelevant world, where we humans could realise how trivial are our divisions and discriminations. At present, AI is a tool. I doubt that will always be the case. An alternative intelligence will make art of all kinds – with us, and without us. I am ready for a different world.
12 Bytes: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love by Jeanette Winterson is published by Vintage.

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