IS AI really going to dehumanize civilization? I think the opposite is also plausible, considering the nuanced possibilities of the historical dialectic in human social and intellectual progress.

Language sits at the heart of the AI question. For the first time in history, an invention has intruded into humans’ privileged space of causality and expression, pricking their sense of exceptionalism. Artificial intelligence, through large language models, is now using the same instrument for attaining analytical perfection through which humans have long imagined and reasoned this world. For millennia, language has been a central repository of consciousness and civilization. Humans have used this tool to organize, preserve and transmit knowledge.

Despite its centrality, however, there exists a trace of betrayal and stagnancy when we translate a psychologically sophisticated moment into language. It becomes a prison for the ingenuity of human experience. Further, the oppression of terminologies around race, religion, nationhood and ideology has shaped linguistic barbarism that has contributed to divisions and wars.

Just as humans once outsourced physical labor to machines, now AI gives them a chance to see language from a distance, free from the possessive anxiety around definitions and to analyze the ordinariness of its excellence by outsourcing much of their linguistic and empirical pretensions to AI. Paradoxically, liberation from the performance of language may push humanity toward more innovative, instinctual and distinctly human ways of processing ideas, measuring excellence, building teams and beautifying culture on personal and systemic levels. As machines rapidly master analytical and linguistic precision, the communicative order of the human condition may be distinguished by the attraction of origins, by the power of human synchronicity and emotional intelligence, by the mystery of imperfection and by the tang of originality in tears........

© Pakistan Observer