I went to Nvidia's GTC conference in March, which as expected for a conference about graphics processing units, had nothing to do with graphics. Instead everyone was very excited about AI. I was assured that AI would sove this and that, and better than I can. Even accepting this very low bar, it is hard to deny that it has reached a stage where it can do some things significantly better than humans, and others nearly as well.
But don't close this tab just yet. I know you're fatigued by posts abotu AI, and I promise there's a point to this. First though, I need to ramble a bit.
It's weird to attend GTC as an engineer who actually works with GPUs. The conference is not about you. It's a sales and marketing expo, with a gold rush frenzy in the air, and if you aren't in a position in your company to sell or buy, you're in the way. More than one conversation died when it became clear that I was interested in a conversation, not a deal. There are technical talks which are fine, and there are some seriously talented engineers there to talk to, if you can find them. But the overall impression is that the real thing being traded here is hype, and for anyone not peddling or buying it, it can be a lonely place.
I had three excellent conversations. One was with a super cool engineer way smarter than me who was also headed to the conference, on the plane. He may be reading this, and he knows who he is. One was with an awesome Uber driver, who told me about moving to Africa during Covid and his experiences living in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, before moving back to California. And one was with a wonderful lady at the truly beautiful Basilica of St. Joseph when I took a short walk from the conference, after she noticed my name Joseph on my GTC badge.
This made me wonder why exactly there is an angst about AI destroying humanity. I do not mean in the "AI decided to launch all the ICBMs" sense (we should probably do something about that), but in the more essential sense. There is nothing about those conversations that can be replicated by a chatbot, and at no point did I wish the humans I was talking to were better optimized for conversation. The art in the beautiful basilica may be replicated by AI, but not replaced with it, because it cannot replace the one who made it. The only thing about humanity AI has destroyed is made almost every interaction at GTC about potential sales, LinkedIn connections, and general dealmaking. That is worth mourning.
A worry that AI is a threat to humanity in any deep sense is an essential misunderstanding of what a human being is. Our western society has diligently spent the last several hundred years reducing the person to a meat computer--a bundle of neurons that can perform tasks, and ideally for ten dollars an hour or less. If that is all we are, then a silicon version of it that can do so better is indeed an existential crisis. But as the sick, spiteful man from Notes From Underground insists, I am a man, not a piano key.
My favorite place in the world is a particular monastery, and last time I was there, one of the monks and I were talking about ChatGPT. The monk remarked that ChatGPT can say prayers but cannot pray. I cannot think of a better definition of a LLM than that, or a better definition of a human being. To pray is to imply a real relationship, and that is more than just forming sentences and stringing words together into familiar patterns, even if we sometimes reduce it to that, in our erroneous nominalism and tired routines. If I am to actually have a relationship with my friends, my parents, etc, there is something deeper than just saying setences. It requires love.
Love may be the most uniquely human characteristic, and here I'm obviously not talking about mere affection, or superficial sentimentality, or sexuality, and definitely not some dreary and academic "shared affinity for the human species". I'm not even going to define it, because I think, in the end, it's a mystery and is better left without my clumsy definitions. You know what it is. If you have given and received it, you know from experience, and if you have not, then you know it too, because it is that thing that you want, and that lies behind everything we do.
It's this characteristic that makes me neither excited for AI or worried about it. It cannot replace us, unless we make ourselves replaceable by flattening our concept of the human being to just some kind of meat robot.
Only you can pray.