Photo by Noah Silliman

I was absorbed in an online course on Deep Learning, as they call it, despite the unseasonably warm weather outside. I was in my (unfortunately) usual position — slightly hunched over, sitting in an office chair with my back turned to the window. These days, spending more and more time indoors is a kind of coming of age. As the afternoon sunlight poured in, it reduced my figure to a dark silhouette, framed by distant voices of children playing in the sun.

I couldn’t help but wonder: if an ambitious nerd like myself creates a super-intelligent AI, is this how we would want it to observe humanity? Hunched over, sacrificing the present, not knowing if the promised future will ever come? Even if it comes, would it think it was worth it?

Building modern AI systems is less of an exact science than most people realize. The truth is, we don’t know why a neural network works as well as it does. We build learning algorithms that are based on the way humans learn, expecting machines to behave like us. They have consistently missed that expectation, and they will probably never meet it either. And that’s not because humans are orders of magnitude more behaviorally complex than any series or web of artificial neurons — it’s because our decisions as living beings are driven by the fear that one day we will die.

Modern AI agents don’t care about “dying”. For that, you could call them naive, or even brave. Just like us, they are called to make decisions that contain hundreds of variables and unknowns. But unlike us, they are programmed to learn from the mistakes they make along the way, regardless of how long it has to “live”. For a machine, success and failure carry the same existential impact: none. The prospect of death is neither negative nor positive. By contrast, we are taught to evaluate every living moment of our lives under the premise that all the time we spend failing is simply time not spent succeeding at something else. In short, we completely miss the point.

We are obsessed with finding purpose, and so we miss it when it finally comes. There is no greater evil to gift the youth than to tell them they must find their purpose while they’re young. If they consider themselves smart, they will spend countless days weighing their options and making ‘rational’ and ‘informed’ decisions. They later realize that human beings, let alone teenagers, are rarely rational or properly informed. Still, there I was, making the ‘rational’ decision to learn about neural nets instead of bathe in the sun.