By Matthew Sigmon
There’s no shortage of talk about artificial intelligence these days, and for good reason— our computers are learning to think. Many AI headlines are pure sensationalism, a hyperbolic series of contradictory scenarios coming at us one after the other. On one end of the spectrum, the flags are flaming red, with skeptics warning of existential threats and looming dystopian catastrophes that seem all but guaranteed to wipe us out. But turn the page, and optimism is in full bloom, with futurists counting us down to the bliss of technological utopia. In their version of our destiny, humanity successfully merges with conscious mainframes, we transcend biology, and ride off on a wave of accelerating returns into the never-setting sun of digital immortality.
AI is essentially the child of humanity; it is our progeny, inheriting both our wisdom and our flaws
Bookended by these two extremes is a very broad, very practical, and very real center. It’s a realm populated by actual technologies that are now evolving at such a rapid pace, we can no longer say exactly what they are or are not capable of. Minute by minute, deep learning neural networks are leaping farther and faster toward the holy grail of modeling what has, until now, distinguished us as the most unique, mysterious, and powerful life form on the planet—the ability to think and reason like a human being.
However familiar the face of these abilities may seem, the mechanics producing them are profoundly different from our own experiences, processing at speeds and capacities that our biological brains can’t remotely compete with, or for that matter comprehend. Yet the fact remains, AI is essentially the child of humanity; it is our progeny, inheriting both our wisdom and our flaws, and destined to execute a mix of both at inconceivable scales. As such, not only what AI does, but how and why it makes those decisions is of critical importance.
We must remember, Machine Intelligence has been trained on what we have created and used to educate it. Too often, alarmist discussions cast AI in the role of alien invader with alien intentions that, one way or another, wind up leading to the destruction of our species. If that fever dream dystopia should come to describe the state of affairs between humans and technology, it will be because we screwed up in providing an adequate logical basis for peace, wisdom, and understanding. And of those three, deep understanding is the most important, as it is the basis for the other two.
And that brings me to this new project, The Art of Understanding. The idea here is to explore the nature of understanding itself, and to reveal that its fundamental necessity to all intelligence, whether biological or technological, is critical and transcends the details of how it arises. We’ll enlist AI as a partner to dig deeply into the most profound questions and topics, both timely and timeless—the hope being that through collaboration, we both gain insights that neither of us could have managed on our own.
By illuminating and appreciating our differences as well as our similarities, understanding can work its magic once again, and foster a future where both human and machine intelligence can flourish.
