by Jasper Gilley

Note: this post is a sequel/conclusion to the prior post We’re Still in the Industrial Revolution. It would be helpful to read that post before this one.

I recently stumbled across this stressful cartoon:

The above image originally appeared in the Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near. Ray Kurzweil has been bashed on this site before, but despite the apocalyptic overtones to most of his work, we’d be kidding ourselves to deny that there remains something compelling about fundamental parts of his message. Machines are indeed making incredible advances in (most) of the fields described in the above drawing, with no signs of stopping.

To contextualize, let’s examine the specifics of the current instance of human-replacement. Virtually all recent machine advances have been fueled by the advent of machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI). We, as a species, feel particularly threatened by AI because it threatens to make obsolete what we think of as the defining characteristic of humanity – intelligence. In other words, if an alien visitor to Earth were to ask a human what humanity is good for, 9 times out of 10, he’d get the response, “humans are good for being intelligent.” That AI threatens to supersede humans in (at least some) areas of intelligence, our species’ defining characteristic, is precisely why Ray Kurzweil is so controversial. His fame comes from pouring salt in the wound that is humans’ collective AI identity crisis.

Yet AI is, as was mentioned in We’re Still in the Industrial Revolution, just another micro-industrialization, and micro-industrializations have been occurring for the past 200 years. Moreover, people were far more up-in-arms (literally) about the original micro-industrialization of the textiles. Humans’ collective AI identity crisis isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been about AI. Rather, it’s a 200-year-old phenomenon, perhaps better known as the Industrial Identity Crisis, with sub-identity crises for each micro-industrialization.

This suggests, however, that humans’ collective identity hasn’t always been static. That is, “intelligence” wouldn’t necessarily be the answer given to the alien had he landed 200 years ago. Rather, he likely would have been told that humans’ capacity for manual labor was the thing that made them unique. After all, the vast majority of humans in 1817 still worked in the manual labor-intensive jobs that would be automated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t as if any terrestrial animal could do agriculture like humans could.

Thus, still being in the Industrial Revolution, we have no reason to suppose that “intelligence”, broadly defined, is by any means a lasting definition of what humans are good for. In all probability, if our proverbial alien were to land in 50 years, he would not receive such an answer. Rather, he would be told that humans are good for a class of things not automatable by AI. To Ray Kurzweil, nothing isn’t automatable by AI, but of course, to certain 19th-century futurists, nothing wasn’t automatable by robots. I’d argue that the alien would, in 50 years, be told that creativity is what humans are good for. Yes, AI algorithms have “composed in the style of Bach”, but they did so in a very different way than a human would have, and furthermore, composing in the style of someone isn’t creativity – it’s mimicry, which deserves to be automated anyway.

Enough speculation. We’ve established that humans’ collective identity is constantly evolving in tandem with new technologies being developed, but does that mean that the question “what are humans good for?” will always generate a different answer at different points in time? It is perhaps no coincidence that a philosopher born at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution provided guidance to humans at all stages of the Industrial Revolution 125 years ago. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his magnum opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is an over-going and an under-going.

Humans’ identity should not be defined by where we are. Where we are is constantly in flux, so it is impossible to conjure up a lasting identity based upon it. Rather, our identity should be defined by the flux itself – that where we are, we soon will not be.

So, if an alien lands in your backyard and asks you “what are humans good for?”, give him an answer that won’t be untrue in 50 years. As long as the Industrial Revolution lasts, humans are good for the constant reinvention of what it means to be human.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra translated from German by R.J. Hollingdale and Jasper Gilley.

Featured image is the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich.