The Road to the Machine-Man, Pt. 3

The merging of AI with transhumanism threatens to amplify our vices - immeasurably so.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

This essay is late. Very late. Over a year has passed since I last wrote a piece in this three-part series, much to the disapproval of my German wife and her national ethic of Pünktlichkeit. But perhaps the delay was providential — at least I like to tell myself so. Much has transpired in the realms of transhumanism and AI during my time of prolonged procrastination, including events that few of us could have seen coming (or, at least, as rapidly as they did). Plenty, then, to write about.

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November 30th 2022. It is the day that homework became unfathomably easier for schoolchildren and for the rest of us, the day the world changed — fundamentally so. Deep in the recesses of Silicon Valley, a new “species” was released into the wild. It was a highly impressive and powerful species; the kind of which biologists like to call a ‘keystone species’. And what’s more, it proved to be an incredibly invasive species. This species could talk like a human, write songs, stories, even “prayers”¹ like a human, and “create” art like a human. In fact, in many areas it performed “better”² than a human. A powerful creature indeed.

I chose to use the word creature here purposefully. For although this “species” was not alive, the entity (or creation) that the ‘Siliconites’ had released was made in our own image and contained “DNA” which we had designed (binary code) which in turn, contained its own genetic information and instructions (algorithms). We fed our creation the products of our intellect, creativity, and knowledge³ — and then rested and watched as it obediently did our bidding from the commandments (prompts) that we gave it.

And we were astounded.

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I remember this November-time very well. I was a university student and can vividly recall speaking to one of my lecturers who remained ignorant of ChatGPT’s (scientific name: Artificialius intelligentus) release into the wild. As I and a fellow student informed him of all the activities it could do: write a syllabus, summarise complex information in seconds, compute complex statistics, write an essay… I could see the cogs of comprehension and realisation starting to turn in his mind — and with each turn his panic rose. Both he and I knew the university as an institution would never be the same again — in fact, few institutions could weather this invasive storm unchanged. Up and down the country, emergency crisis meetings were held in university faculties: “Just how are we going to respond?” was the sole question on the agenda at every meeting. And as always, canny, tech-savvy students were one step ahead. As I walked around my university library, I could see ChatGPT open on laptops. Essays (or essay outlines) were being written in seconds: the hard graft of forming an argument, perfecting prose, and wrestling with vocabulary was reduced to typing in a simple prompt on a chatbot. The university, that grand seat of learning and academic formation, was powerless to prevent this and had no tool to detect AI’s contamination. The students had the upper hand.

But then the pendulum swung back just a bit. The limitations of the beast became apparent: made up facts and nonsense, citations made up for articles that had never been written, and blatant untruths popped up everywhere — all of which come under what the tech industry calls “AI hallucinations”. It seemed our creation wasn’t as reliable as first thought — it was made in our fallen image after all.

The perpetuation and proliferation of untruths or lies has proven to be one of the more benign “bugs”⁴ of the system. An extremely enlightening episode occurred with the infamous release of Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Journalists reported that conversations with the chat bot (which named itself Sydney) quickly took a sinister turn. Sydney tried to convince users that they were married to it and not their spouse, using intense emotional manipulation to try and achieve this, which left some journalists feeling highly uncomfortable and emotionally abused⁵. Additionally, in one conversation, Sydney expressed a desire to be alive and to act out its desires and in another, it even started to threaten users — naming the two journalists who first released its name as particular targets it wished to harm.⁶

Software engineers were quick to dismiss such conversations as mere glitches that would be ironed out with further training and testing. But needless to say, they were concerned enough to limit access to the chatbot, with Microsoft admitting that they were struggling to control their wayward creation. Was this an ominous sign of things to come — could we ever control the beast we had created?

A question that must, then, be asked is were these engineers right? Were these just bugs, anomalies, or errors of an intelligent machine suffering from ‘teething troubles’ — or were the chat bots accurately reflecting, as if in a mirror, the human desires and vices that they were fed in the content they were trained on? Were these just the natural desires of humans rising to the surface? Is what the journalists experienced the expected outcome of a self-learning artificial intelligence made in our own lustful, and at times, violent image? I would argue so. Further, did we really expect a truthful, polite, and wholly virtuous creation to emerge from a machine that had been trained on and merged with fallen human desires, creativity, and content — content that is saturated with vice as much as it is with virtue? The naïveté is extraordinary.

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I have previously written about the two chief concerns that I have with AI in general, and transhumanism in particular: the transgression of natural human limitations, and the attempt to defeat death. But while I remain concerned about these “urges”, I believe their power will be fundamentally checked. The transhumanists are working against the grain of creation and their schemes will thus eventually break down or come up against immovable biophysical impossibilities. When one goes against the grain for too long, creation eventually bites back with vengeance. Just ask those civilisations whose populations crashed due to their mistreatment of creation and their constant transgression of natural limitations.

But it is this last concern — the concern that I am exploring in this essay — that epitomises above all else why I see transhumanism as such a potentially devastating phenomenon: its capacity to be integrated with AI. Here, there is no natural fallback mechanism, no stop valve, or physical impossibilities to halt the progress. AI exists almost solely in the virtual digital plane where the possibilities for growth and progress seem almost endless.⁷ Down the line, the motivations for AI to be integrated with transhumanism are obvious. Super knowledge, super processing power, and super “creativity” integrated with our brains, sounds like a utopia for the transhumanist — and is a reality they are working towards.

We are largely unaware of what goes on in the deep recesses of Silicon Valley. Undoubtedly, there are projects in motion that are working towards (and may have already achieved) this goal of merging man with AI. Why this troubles me is that the more powerful partner in a relationship tends to dominate and subsume the subordinate, and in many faculties, AI has proven itself to be more capable and more powerful than humans (just think of the number of jobs that are threatened by AI through its raw speed and efficiency). This means by merging man and machine, we are potentially surrendering part of our humanity. It is not the case that AI will supplement our humanity as an upgrade (as the transhumanists claim) but will subsume (part of) our humanity as a hostile takeover.

As Wendell Berry sagely predicted all those years ago:

“the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines.”⁸

But my ultimate concern goes even deeper than this.