Artificial Intelligence: Its Challenge for Human Experience |
The development of AI represents one stage in humanity’s adjustment to their own creations: machines.
Computers provide a style of cognition and technical expression. Intelligence is much broader than that.
Societal well-being means controlling our machines and supporting the broad range of human expression.
“John Henry, he could hammer. He could whistle. He could sing.”
So begins Harry Belafonte’s famous 1954 rendition of a classic American song. Because his family needed money, John Henry went to a nearby mountain where he asked the contemptuous “captain” for work building the railroad. A challenge was set between our mythic hero and the captain’s new steam drill. Although the machine soon sputtered and failed, John Henry broke his body and his heart in the quest. He died with a hammer in his hands.
The ballad’s message: “A man ain’t nothing but a man.” Spirited creatures, we work as we must, but we also do many other things, whistling and singing among them. We love our families and sacrifice ourselves on their behalf. We fight those who challenge and disrespect us. We live and die as bravely as we can.
Machines, it seems, have only one purpose: to accomplish their assigned tasks. They may break, as that drill did, but they can be repaired. And a new, technically improved version soon arrives. Their lack of sympathy and moral reflection makes them relentless.
The ballad of John Henry—like the modern transformation itself—has an air of tragedy about it. As baby John predicted (“sitting on his daddy’s knee”) that “steel” would be his downfall, so we moderns understand that the machine world will only expand in scope and importance. On the one hand, those devices make us more powerful and scrutinizing than any generation in history. On the other, they cause us, as individuals, to become ever less competent to judge or even understand those processes we now depend on. Social and cultural living moves beyond the human scale.
The age of the steam engine, with its clattering contraptions, boiler rooms, and black locomotives terrifying horses, is long gone. New machines and new sources of power have risen in its place.........