The Transcendent Promise of Intelligent Machines Will Give Us More Time to Connect & Be Creative
If we optimistically build Artificial Intelligence (AI) infused with our highest aspirations, what kind of societal betterment might we expect? I believe if we build intelligent machines with equity, fairness, and goodness at their core —with a sense of humanity, in service of the rights, agency, and dignity we all deserve to enjoy — intelligent machines may give us the capacity to realize our collective human potential.
This powerful transformation will liberate us from many of the mundane tasks, responsibilities, and number-crunching dominating our time in the here and now (whether we want to give up these jobs or not), so humans can become creative explorers, take imaginative adventures, and invest in storytelling, community building, and reaching for the stars, elevating our lives in innumerable ways.
What might you do with a life that has more time and mental space for dreaming, creating, inventing, and discovering?
Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.
—Ginni Rometty
Instead of replacing us, Augmented Intelligence—an amplified version of human intelligence— offers a way of looking at AI as a way to assist humans and heighten our experience. Augmented reality will be capable of adding many levels to our human experience, through superimposing sensory input onto our real lives, enhancing our perception of reality. With AI we can reconstruct our past and use it to learn more about ourselves and what we want for our future. This shift in perspective will be important as we move forward. As we have seen, technology, from the printing press to the internet, has expanded humans’ ability to process and share information. With AI we may be able to discover and comprehend more of what our ancestors experienced and analyze patterns in our history with more objectivity, informing better decisions about our future. Incorporating intelligent technology is a natural extension of this evolution.
If we let AI do what it does best, it can leave us space to, as Steve Jobs put it, make that “ding in the universe.” One way technology could help accomplish that is by releasing many more people’s artistic potential. At present, AI can enhance your hand-drawn sketches and can mold a digital sculpture or a “vocal fingerprint” from the human voice. It can already create fiction and poetry, win chess matches, have its own art exhibitions, and compose music. The first portrait made by an AI algorithm went up for auction at Christie’s in October 2018 and fetched $432,000. In partnership with humans, AI can inspire us to new aesthetic endeavors such as with the AI software NSynth, which invents sounds and music that allows composers to seek new heights.
It’s an exciting prospect: AIs can work together, and with us, to create new artistic styles and to broaden the definition of what actually constitutes art, perhaps teaching us something about ourselves in the process. The proliferation of digitally intelligent tools (if they become more widely available) can help to make the ability to enjoy and become involved with the art world more democratic. If more people—especially those who have been historically disenfranchised, those separated from metropolitan centers replete with museums, arts classes, and the like, and those excluded from participation in culture by their socioeconomic status—have the means to make art for the first time, they will have more of a say in shaping culture.
Partnering with our intelligent machines will also raise fascinating questions about what constitutes good art and how an artist (human or computer) should approach the act of creation. For example, do you let an algorithm determine how the script for a TV show should be written, based on proven data about what audiences like (or binge watch)? Or do you run that same algorithm and then let the screenwriter consider the results, and then perhaps do something challenging that plays off what it tells her, subverting it and perhaps losing views for the sake of making something new and interesting? The possible results of collaboration are boundless.
AI is also going to give us a chance to contemplate even time itself with fresh eyes, which will encourage curiosity and creativity. There is a reason why Einstein spoke of art, music, and imagination, why you might often solve pressing problems in the shower, and why you are more focused after a good night’s sleep.
What do Steve Jobs’s calligraphy class, Isaac Newton’s sitting under an apple tree, Archimedes’s bathtub, and Fleming’s post-vacation accidental discovery of penicillin have in common? These polymaths devoted time to letting their minds drift and ponder the cosmos. They were doing something other than fixating directly on the matter at hand, allowing their thoughts to wander outside the box, resulting in world-changing breakthroughs.
Unburdened by the overwhelming demands of sifting through the world’s increasing surfeit of information, we might be able to take a step back, let AI assist us in seeing the data as a whole, and find the patterns and connections within it, just as Helen Frankenthaler saw the beauty and the patterns in paint splatter, developing a new artistic genre in the process.
I believe that AI will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I can’t say when or what form factors are involved, but I think it’s inevitable, because the very things that make AI successful today—the availability of comprehensive data and the ability for machines to make sense of that data—can be applied to the data of our lives. And those data are here today, available for all of us, because we lead digitally mediated lives, in mobile and online.
—Tom Gruber
Beyond allowing us to broaden our interests and grow creatively, augmented intelligence can help to combat assaults on truth and reason currently propagated through algorithms by exposing the abuse and manipulation of data. Personal, devoted AIs could more objectively analyze our statistics to help us to become more aware of how much we are marketed to and exploited by information targeting our own sense of self, instead of inviting solely commercial interests to tell us what we should buy, wear, use, and consume. We could gain more perspective and control over destructive behavioral inclinations and societal pressures.
If we are able to guarantee a legal right to our own cognitive liberty, which is a right to mental self-determination, and the freedom to control our own mental state and protect freedom of thought, as arguably already anticipated by some foundational human rights instruments, digital intelligence might also help to raise our emotional intelligence and connect us with others in ways that yield more meaning and purpose. On a basic level, we can use the AI tools we already have, like voice-activated virtual assistants, to lift our eyes away from screens and toward each other, so we spend less time scrolling, tapping, and clicking, and more time looking up and at each other. We would then become more likely to make emotionally intelligent decisions with more confidence about the kinds of societies and communities we want to be a part of.
AI is moving us toward a place where certain kinds of work will no longer be done by humans. This is not new, but the scale and pace of change is. Many jobs now done electronically and mechanically were once done by humans, from spacecraft trajectory calculators, to elevator operators, to bowling alley pinsetters. While the possibility of ceding more of our work to machines is frightening, this shift is something that we as individuals and as a society can embrace, as long as we have prepared ourselves for the change. I contend that we can, in fact, have fuller—though very different—lives once AI takes over some of our work.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we have had a torrent of ever-increasing automation that is likely to increase exponentially. There is no turning this train around. It is going to change the very nature of work and employment, which has always been distributed unequally, keeping many in a cycle of destitution and stunting entrepreneurship, creativity, and the ability of many to benefit from innovation. But the disruption of traditional work and career paths also creates great opportunity. The development of AI applications, businesses, and in- vestment is set to generate unprecedented amounts of new capital, for example, increasing the UK economy alone by a projected $837 billion by 2035. The creation of this vast new wealth may give us a chance to finally engineer fairness into the fabric of our societies.
All of this is possible, while increasing the supply and demand for human creativity and ideas. AI is coming for our jobs and our markets regardless, and can help to economically empower many, uplifting people out of dire economic circumstances and reshaping our approach to governmental spending, igniting entrepreneurial spirit in the process. As we confront the reality that some large percentage of our jobs will become automated and reassigned to AI in the coming years, we will need to reengineer our long-standing economic and political institutions and consider revolutionary societal restructuring.
According to the leading theories on human ambition and actuation, all humans have innate and universal desires that they have to satisfy in order to flourish. We need competence, autonomy, and psychological relatedness, which is inclusion and connection to others. When machines begin to take on a large percentage of labor, we can rewrite the script, focusing on what we can contribute in a new world, as we usher in a new partnership with our machines—one that will allow us to spend our lives in ways that give us autonomy, agency, and purpose.
Adapted from the book “A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are” by Flynn Coleman. Published with permission of Counterpoint Press. Copyright © 2019 by Flynn Coleman. Please see book for for further references.
About the Author
Flynn Coleman is a writer, international human rights attorney, public speaker, professor, and social innovator. She has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government, and international corporations and human rights organizations around the world. Coleman has written extensively on issues of global citizenship, the future of work and purpose, political reconciliation, war crimes, genocide, human and civil rights, humanitarian issues, innovation and design for social impact, and improving access to justice and education. She lives in New York City. A Human Algorithm is her first book. You can find her at her website here.
