"And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
Nowadays, any topic is touching to artificial intelligence (AI). It is a living, breathing phenomenon; vulgarized vastly. Creators of the connectionist AI have been the recipients of ACM Turing Award and Nobel Prize. Science, technology, art, philosophy, law and business as usual discuss AI in different aspect every day. Governments are after regulating and fortifying their digital sovereignty by gaining AI dominance; companies are trying to find innovative ways of devising AI for more profit; average Joe wants to entertain himself and delegate as much of his chores as possible to AI; marketers call every machine, which is able to run software, "AI augmented" such that AI modem, AI TV, AI phone, AI vacuum cleaner... In short, world embraced AI, AI seduced the world, no major resistance exists.
Today, I am not going to discuss AI but human.
Nietzsche said "God is dead" and obliged humanity to build a novel value system because any given ethics would not be functional anymore. It was the dawn of "Übermensch" who was a selfmade being and was able to exist in the nihilist world. In this vague world, human dropped atom bombs on the land and in the ocean; vaporized hundreds of thousands of human beings in seconds. Heidegger watched those bombs, learned his lesson and positioned "authentic dasein" to be careful about technology. It was a big caution pointing the dangers of misuse of technology in the history. Virilio beautifully put forth his ideas on increasing speed and information volume we need to handle as a result of advancements in technology. Andy Clark and David Chalmers described us as natural born cyborgs whose traits are expanded by using many forms of technology in our daily lives, especially the technologies that support our cognitive abilities result in a situation named "extended mind".
Big minds have been thinking about technology and it effects in human nature, for centuries. It is obvious that it has been and will be a dialectic process: We will see the outcomes, in a very dynamic and unforseen way. There won't be any predefined recipe of technological way forward. Human evolution is in its fastest form.
In a world of pervasive AI use, how will we identify natural human touch? Up to this day, our systems were trying to distinguish human beings from software agents by using Turing test dialects. It was already an interesting picture, in which human beings struggle to prove themselves to some software systems for not being a software agent... Remember the web sites with "I am not a robot" check box or CAPTCHA protocols. Today, we are in a position where humans need to understand whether or not their peers are authentic humans. Perhaps, we need to find a test method for this.
Thinking about that challenge, I tried to define some attributes of human beings:
- Human beings make typos
- Humans write short texts
- Humans think simple
- Humans utter the first words in their minds
- Humans are stubborn
- Humans are persistent
- Humans lie
- Humans react emotionally
Besides, I noticed that humans frequently use GenAI for doing their non-humane tasks such as writing a 200+ pages of thesis, controlling interdependencies of different sources of information, editing a video compsed of millions of frames, writing in a foreign language at which they are not very good etc.
I usually think critically but in general, I am an optimistic person. Therefore, I am not expecting any AI caused apocalypse but to me, number of cognitively deskilled persons will increase because of "AI abuse" which is not a surprize, even today.
Think.