Technological progress and the risk of an artificial heart (Part 2/3)
How our life might be contained digitally within social media and a digitized envelope.
Like many, I have three social media accounts: Instagram, Facebook, and a barely used Twitter account. I phased out posting to all three while working in New York and will now occasionally scroll, perhaps quietly when the kids are in bed or while waiting at the school run. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the ways that the concept of the digital envelope links to the ways that we connect online, whether through curated squares and snapshots or short, pithy tweets.
Below is another excerpt from a piece originally published on TEMPI, translated from Italian: “To talk about artificial intelligence, we must answer the question: what is man?”
Our life, social media, and the digitized envelope
In the digital realm, we consider social media. With platforms like Facebook or Instagram, we have transformed our social relationships, the sharing of images and opinions into a digital envelope, completely digitizing these interactions. We have created a virtual environment where artificial intelligence can achieve great success thanks to access to a huge amount of data. These algorithms work well by optimizing certain metrics, such as the time we spend on platforms, rather than accurately informing us about events. The goal is to maximize revenue for companies like Meta by optimizing the time our attention is captured on the platform, thus increasing the chances that advertisers can sell advertising or products.
This situation raises important questions about which aspects of our lives we are willing to transform into a digitized shell and to what extent we are willing to mechanize and robotize our realities to facilitate the success of automation. We read in Pope Francis’ social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, from 2020, what he says about social media:
“In digital communication we want to show everything and every individual becomes the object of gazes that rummage, expose and disclose, often anonymously. Respect for others crumbles and in this way, at the same time as I move him, ignore him and keep at a distance, without any shame I can invade his life to the extreme.”
The reason for the success of artificial intelligence
During a recent journalism class, I attempted to explain to participants what ChatGPT is, how it works, and what impact it can have on the journalism profession. A question from a student raised a very pertinent point: often, to understand the extent of progress and the role of artificial intelligence in shaping the future, we turn to examples such as nuclear fission or the invention of the printing press, which have undoubtedly transformed the world. However, it is never a single technology that changes everything in isolation. Rather, it is the cultural, historical, and social context surrounding these technologies. And the question was: “What is the cultural context today that could allow AI to become a technology responsible for an epochal change?”
Reflecting on what was discussed regarding the robotic and digital envelope, we can extend the concept to a “cultural envelope” that allows a technology not only to be successful but also to be accepted and integrated into the society now predisposed to be able to make it work at its best. This student, therefore, asked what the current cultural framework is that facilitates the success of these systems. The answers to this question are crucial to understanding how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can be directed and shaped for positive or negative impact on our society.
The reason for the success of AI, which captures so much attention, investment and resources, is complex and multifaceted. I don’t have a definitive answer to that student’s question, but it’s a point that I’ve begun to think about a lot in an effort to understand better the direction in which these technologies are moving.
The anthropological problem
An underlying conception in AI development is that if being human is reducible to what happens in our brains, then it should be possible to replicate it. The brain is seen as a machine, a set of gears, which, with an adequate model, could be perfectly mimicked thanks to the advancement of knowledge, the availability of more data and greater computational power.
This cultural conception is very worrying. If man is considered like a machine, nothing prevents us from treating him as such. What, then, is the dignity of the human being in a context where products are developed that exploit humanity itself, such as social media algorithms? This is a fundamental question that we must address to understand not only the capabilities of emerging technologies but also their ethical limits and their impact on society. Again, in Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI’s 2009 social encyclical writes:
“Technological development can induce the idea of the self-sufficiency of technology itself when many, questioning himself only about the how, does not consider the many way whys that push him to act. This is why the technique takes on an ambiguous face. Born from human creativity as an instrument of personal freedom, it can be understood as an element of absolute freedom, that freedom that wants to ignore the limits that things bring within themselves. [...] we would all know, evaluate and decide the situations of our lives from within a technological cultural horizon, to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to find a meaning that is not produced by us. This vision makes the technical mentality so strong today that the truth coincides with the feasible.”
The point raised is very relevant, reflecting on how excessive engineering of every aspect of society and work can distract attention from “why” things are done or certain processes are chosen rather than others. This approach can lead to numerous social problems.
The surprise of the discovery of ChatGPT
This also makes me wonder about the discovery of ChatGPT. The surprise was not so much in its operational capabilities, i.e., in the ability to fulfil many different tasks, but in realizing that it is enough to “predict the next word” to manage tasks that once required utterly different methodologies. Once upon a time, for example, automatic translation or computer program writing was considered a separate and complex discipline, studied with varying techniques of AI and models. The surprise is realizing that a single approach can encompass all these functions.
Subscribe to Honest AI for the third and final part of ‘Technological progress and the risk of an artificial intelligence’, which explores AI as an extension of us all and returns to the fundamental question. Who are we, and how do we define humanity against artificial intelligence?