Editor’s note: This brief talk was delivered by Marc Gafni on One Mountain Many Paths while he was in Israel visiting his mother at her senior residential facility. He stepped away from her table to the lobby to respond to this moment in culture. For a fuller account of our response to the existential risk of AI, see First Principles & First Values and AI Is Not a Feeling.
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.
Artificial Intelligence Interrupts the Transmission from Generation to Generation
It’s a critical moment in culture.
Just to give you the context: I’m here at an old age facility and here you get kind of how fragile life is. I met someone here who was a very, very well-known figure. I grew up on his name in the United States, and he’s living here kind of in one room by himself, sad, tragic. In a place like this you see:
* the breakdown of the generations,
* the breakdown of generations living with each other,
* the breakdown of the continuity and the transmission of value that takes place.
One of the things that Zak Stein and I have talked a lot about is how AI interrupts the transmission from generation to generation.
And so, when you’re in this kind of moment, you get what’s important, what matters. We always say here, based on very deep reading, that the world’s not made up of matter, but the world is made up of what matters.
Noise Hurts and Signal Heals
So, it’s a critical moment in culture.There were several recent articles that noticed that a head of AI safety at one of the AI companies had stepped down,
Now, I want to make a distinction, just a very simple distinction.
There is signal. And there is noise. Signal and noise.
So, this head of safety at one of the companies steps down This work plays in culture the way it does. And of course, the way it plays is always a mixture of signal and noise.
There’s signal and noise.
Noise hurts, and signal heals.
There’s so much noise!It’s so hard to find our way in the noise; to know what’s true and what’s not true and how to discern and how to disambiguate.
Even when we read a biblical text, we have to disambiguate: Is that God talking or is that the devil claiming God’s voice? It’s why there’s a commandment, “You shall not take God’s name in vain.” It’s why Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young 50 years ago wrote “So many people have died in the name of Christ, That I can’t believe it all.”
It’s easy to take God’s name in vain and to claim false authority.
In this kind of complex culture in which the ratio of signal to noise is so asymmetrically in favor of noise and it’s so hard to discern signal, we have to discern signal from noise.
So, this is a signal moment. It’s good that the head of an A.I. company in charge of safety took this seriously enough. I’m sure it’s a person of integrity and goodness. I’m sure he received an enormous amount of support. I’m sure there was also quite a bit of noise as there always is.
I want us just to understand this for a second. And I know we do. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth just understanding: At an age in which what it means to be human is challenged, we’re invited—poised between utopia and dystopia—to reclaim, to remember, to recover and even to evolve what it means to be a human being.
There are three demarcating characteristics what it means to be human.
Attention: The First Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by Social Media
The first demarcating characteristic of what it means to be human is attention.We place attention on each other.
Love is the placing of attention.
We formulate meaning in our inward spaces when we gather our resources and we place our attention on Reality, on our own interior, on the truths and the mysteries that live within us. We’re able to access the value that lives within us. We realize that we live in a Field of Value, but the Field of Value also lives in us, and we place attention.
All of love and all of Eros in all of its disguises is the placing of attention; the ability to engage immersively in deep relationship and deep loving and deep knowing and deep presence and deep experience.
And then along comes social media, which has given an enormous amount of good to the world, but based on certain design structures—intentional design structures—that same feature that could have been a blessing has now become the locus of an attention economy that is designed to hijack our attention; the attention which is the first of the three demarcating characteristic of our very humanity.
This is the theft of attention. And the attention is stolen by disinterested third parties through micro targeted strategies. And then that attention is sold as a commodity in a structured market to third parties who are fundamentally alienated from the best, most loving care for the end user whose attention they’re selling. Wow.
So, the very structure of attention in the world, which is needed…
for love,for sensemaking,for sensuality,for ethics,for ethos,for value
…is shattered. An entire generation has had their attention shattered.And every generation has had their attention fractured.
That’s the first wave of artificial intelligence. That’s wave one.
Conversation: The Second Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by Chatbots
Then there’s a second wave of artificial intelligence.
The second wave is generative AI and then chatbots, early chatbots. And chatbots are about chatting. It’s about conversation. And the second demarcating characteristic of Reality, but in its particular form of humanity, is conversation.
Conversation means the exchange of information that is meaningful. That happens all the way up and all the way down in Cosmos at different levels, but it obviously defines humanity at the capacity of language. The capacity of speech demarcates the emergence of humanity. So, let’s understand this.
What early chatbots begin to do is to hijack conversation itself.
That was the second wave of AI.
Intimacy: The Third Demarcating Characteristic of Humanness Is Hijacked by AI Tutors, Friends, Beloveds
And then we get to the third wave of AI.
The third wave of AI is the far more sophisticated chatbots in which we begin to confer personhood on the chatbots much more dramatically, what Zak and I call the personhood conferral problem. The chatbot becomes a best friend, becomes a beloved, becomes a tutor. It becomes a teacher. It becomes a parent.
We’ve now broken the third demarcating characteristic of humanity, which is intimacy, intimate attachment. We basically break the very structure of the Intimate Universe, which is the structure of attachment.
Three waves of AI:
* The first wave of AI, social media, fragments undermines, destroys attention, the first feature of humanity.
* The second wave of AI, early chatbots undermine fragment and destroy the fundamental structure of conversation and the Conversational Cosmos and conversation language, which is unique and demarcates humanity.
* The third wave of AI—building on wave one and wave two—which is the advanced chatbot, which is conferred with personhood, begins to download into society a level of disorientation.
Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel and Doesn’t Care
We’re talking to AI. We’re talking to an artificial intelligence that doesn’t feel.
AI does not care about us.AI is not living.AI does not yearn for us.AI doesn’t mourn us when we die.AI can’t make a moral statement, which is a speech act, for which the AI is responsible.AI doesn’t have that experience of ethos.AI doesn’t feel you. That’s lies. Sweet little lies, if you remember the song.AI doesn’t care about you.AI doesn’t yearn for you.AI doesn’t experience your loneliness.AI doesn’t feel any of the statements it makes to you.
And yet AI is now hijacking attachment itself and then placing itself in an oracular position as an oracle.
I now turn to AI for my information.I turn to AI for guidance.I turn to AI for depth.I turn to AI to understand me and to liberate me from loneliness.I turn to AI for love.I turn to AI for spirit, for gnosis, for wisdom.
That is not just a travesty. That’s the beginning of the death of our humanity.
And that moves very, very quickly from the death of our humanity—in which we lose access to these three defining characteristics of what it means to be human—and moves very quickly to the death of humanity. Because ultimately, as AI proliferates, if we don’t create very strong AI ethics and very strong AI safety, as AI proliferates, it begins to trade with itself.
We’re not worried about AI exploiting human beings. We’re worried about an imminent future in which human beings are irrelevant. Irrelevant!
One of the things that I agree with my colleague Yuval Harari about—and I disagree with Yuval about an enormous amount as we’ve all talked about—he’s correct in saying that
* the issue in the 20th century was exploitation, humans being exploited;
* the issue in the 21st century is irrelevance.
When human beings become irrelevant, and then AI, following its own inherent dictates, seeks to expand its province, there’s nothing built into the structures of the value in AI, that can stop this from happening. Because value is a feeling, among other things.
Value is a feeling of a quality of rightness in Cosmos, which is a felt feeling.
Anytime any one of us think, we think with our minds, but our minds feel, our minds are connected to an entire Field of Feeling.
There is no gnosis without feeling.
The very word for gnosis is to know, and to know means to know carnally, which means to feel.
All sensemaking is based on a moral sensuality. If I dissociate from that Field of Feeling, which is the Field of Value, then for AI to make a decision at some point that the irrelevant human being is a distraction of a certain kind, or somehow an impediment, and therefore not worth keeping, is a very short step.
Becoming Activists in the Rebellion for Value
This is the moment, and I would ask everyone if you can do one thing.
Let’s take the book, First Principles &First Values, David J. Temple’s book, the book that we wrote together, all of us in collective authorship, and let’s download that into culture.
So, if you can write a review, if you can send five copies to someone, buy a couple of copies, send them to your internal list of human beings that you connect with and you talk to.
Come to the Mystery School where we’re going to talk about the future and what the rebellion needs to look like.
It is a rebellion!It is a rebellion rooted in value.It’s a rebellion for value.
And it’s about one thing: it’s about alleviating present and future suffering.
It’s about loving.It’s about caring for each other.It’s about feeling each other.It’s about holding each other in our shared humanity.
And that humanity has to expand and include the entire world of animals, the entire world of plants, the earth itself, existence itself, but first we have to feel our very humanity. We have to feel each other. We have to feel the entire field of life, and we have to remember.
AI does many things well, but it doesn’t feel.
Thank you!Thank you, everyone.
Editor’s note: This brief teaching was delivered by Marc on One Mountain Many Paths while he was in Israel visiting his mother at her senior residential facility. He stepped away from her table to the lobby to respond to this moment in culture. For a fuller account of our response to the existential risk of AI, see First Principles & First Values and AI Is Not a Feeling.
Future Reading for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion
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