AI to the rescue

 I have what I think is a natural revulsion for AI shared by many who would label
themselves progressives or forward-thinkers. It's not that I fear change, but I do fear someone else breaking into the cockpit of my mind and taking over the controls, plundering six thousand years of accumulated human wisdom before I've even had a chance to finger its prettiest baubles. Wait your turn, AI!

But maybe I've been looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe, just maybe, AI will give us the extraordinary opportunity to explore and finally define what makes us human: what can't be copied, can't be programmed, can't be imitated. What makes us, and will forever make us, unique.

Inconceivable!

The computer long ago surpassed us in computational speed, but once it has examined a subject from every angle can it create new angles, new vantage points from which to view a problem, new combinations to the Rubik's cube which are outside the cube? Can it conceive the inconceivable, or even entertain the possibility of such mental gymnastics? (Note to self: do some reading on quantum computing. It could be the linear nature of algorithms which has disadvantaged computers.)

I'm not talking here about the soul or the mind or whatever name you give to the ghost in the machine. I don't believe in ghosts. I'm talking about the human brain and all its concordant systems which I believe encompass every cell in the body. The ghost is the machine. What puts the sapiens in homo sapiens?

I don't begin to know the answer, but it would be a really big adventure to seek it.

On a hunch (will computers ever duplicate hunches?) I would say it have something to do with our capacity, our rapacity, for novelty and surprise. It may be that the last surprise is that there is no last surprise. That sounds like a reason to get out of bed every morning. And standing in the wings might be our propensity for play. Perhaps we are not homo sapiens but homo ludens. (Which is, by the way, the title of a great book.)

(Of course, differentiation could lead to segregation--not of the races this time, but of the minds, artificial and human. Computers might take on the aspect of second class citizens. The ethics involved have already been wrestled with by science fiction writers and may soon have to be addressed by professional ethicists. Anybody but me.)