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(2019
final exam assignment) Model final exam answers 2019 (Index) Essay 3: Web Highlights |
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Andrea Gerlach
12 May 2019
Man Made Machine
According to the Theory of Evolution –
which makes two major claims, first, that all living things on Earth are
connected to each other, second, that the diversity of these things is the
result of natural selection – man, as he is today, is just another stage in his
full life span as a species (Darwin). There is nothing that promises that we are
the final stage; however, man seems determinedly on the path to be such. Man got
bored with exploring the world around him in 1958, the year NASA was founded,
and by 1961 JFK announced man was embarking on a new frontier; America was going
to the moon. Manifest Destiny was still alive and well, only the west was not
what we were after (Stapelfeldt, “Humanity Recalled”). Man was setting out to
conquer Outer Space. It turned out that he wasn’t going to run out of places to
go and claim. However, now, man suffers an inexplicable dilemma. Our bodies, as
they are, cannot fulfill our dreams of space exploration. So far, machines have
probed the galactic expanse more than we have. It seems as though, to begin any
real expedition into the final frontier, men will have to modify their bodies
with cybernetics or artificially preserve them to withstand the conditions of
deep space so ill-suited to our kind. Either way, the power has shifted from man
to machine. Regardless of who creates the stuff, machines are fit for the
necessary move from Earth to elsewhere; men are not. Men are going to have to
catch up somehow.
What are the events that have led up to
man being intrigued with the idea and even desiring to perpetrate his own
transmogrification from Homo Homo Sapien to something other? Christa Van Allen’s
research essay, “Singularity and Human Empathy”, proposes an interesting
possibility. She equates Artificial Intelligence and really technology as a
whole to a type of Adam and Eve. As it is ignorant, dependent upon programs, and
obedient to commands, technology in all forms, today, is like man before the
Fall in Genesis 3. If we follow that analogy to its end, we can see how the Fall
itself, the partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, could be
synonymous with AI gaining sentience. However, I believe it goes even deeper
than that, because Jordan B. Peterson makes the case in his book,
12 Rules for Life, that gaining the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, is more specifically man gaining a complete grasp on
the existence of and his desire for good, but his undeniable proclivity for
evil. If this is true, then the Fall for AI is not only gaining sentience, but
also, by innovative design possibly closer on our timeline than we think, taking
part in the human condition. Empathy, which is what everyone seems to think AI
needs, is really the ability to recognize that, like you, everyone around you
also desires to do good just as much as they possess the proclivity to commit
evil. When AI can manage this, man will be on a fast track to singularity.
Singularity, in terms of the Fall, is the moment when Adam and Eve are kicked
out of paradise, the Garden of Eden. Machine will take the place of man. Instead
of the next generation of man inheriting the Earth, Earth will inherit man, from
dust he came, to dust he shall return, and machines will inherit everything
else.
However, none of this will happen if AI
doesn’t make its leap over the hurdle of empathy. If they stay ignorant and
bound to their command prompts, a different sort of problem arises. These
machines will not whine, will not grow tired, will not require compensation.
They are predictable, controllable, and upgradeable at a moment’s notice.
Non-sentient, input/output machines could replace workers in roles as simple as
an assembly line (which they already have in many factories) all the way up to
something as complex as teaching a classroom full of students. Vaneza Cervantes
says in “Artificial Intelligence: Safe or Dangerous?”, “the robot was built to
ease the workload,” but, the way things are going, ease seems to be all man will
be left with. Seemingly, the ways in which machines can replace man stop exactly
where man’s imagination does. If this continues, Cervantes says, “Man [will]
have no work to do.” This is the danger: AI taking over man’s responsibilities
while he still wants them, while he still needs them. The fear of this is what
has caused most of the world’s population to be hesitant and cautious in their
curiosity of AI. It is also what continues to hold singularity back, as much as
it can be.
A possible solution to the looming
threat of AI takeover is to integrate rather than replace. Though there are many
moral implications to body augmentation, cybernetic augmentation might be a
necessary compromise to keep a destructive singularity at bay. If man could
embrace technology into their own bodies, then maybe AI wouldn’t be a replacer
of man, it would be an enhancer. Man’s dreams of space exploration are really
only plausible with machines, one way or another. Innovations would do well to
focus on AI integration into the body organic: a cybernetic mind that requires a
host, not to possess, but cooperate. In a television series called
The 100, the most powerful AI is
created as a small chip with tendrils to latch onto its hosts cranial nerves to
send messages to the brain. It would not inhibit free will, memory, or movement,
only give its human host access to a cyber world within their mind. The internet
within their head. It learns from their emotions, their thoughts and
experiences. These are the kinds of modifications that could propel man to
survive passed singularity. “I would truly wish,” said Mark Stapelfeldt, “to
know how important it is for humans to actually stay human…Out of all of the
outcomes, letting AI take over as a self-fulfilling prophecy is ironic from our
storytelling at best”. Mark recognizes that man is naturally resistant to
change, and that it his resistance to change and improve upon the life already
here that will cause his desire to create independent artificial life to be his
downfall. You can’t play at God and walk away unscathed. That is clear.
Will man see that he is rushing the
process of evolution and singularity? Can AI truly integrate with humanity
without overtaking it? These are the questions that pervade Speculative Fiction.
Our authors throughout the semester were simply, “magnifying perceived crises in
[their] time” (Greg Bellomy, “Class, Identity, Progress, and the Future”). That
is out these scenarios come about. When man wonders what will happen next, he
writes a book, one that usually embodies whatever is the worst that could happen
in their mind. Thanks to them, we can consider so many outcomes. All seem to
point to an inevitable metamorphosis of man, if not his total annihilation. The
only question is when and in what way? Man will have no one to blame but
himself.
Work Cited
Than, Ker. “What Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution?” LiveScience, Purch, 26
Feb. 2018, www.livescience.com/474-controversy-evolution-works.html.
