Yet another in a series of comments on quotes about AI that appeared in a recent Forbes article by Rob Toews.
Today I’m looking over:
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.”
While I think I’ve understood all the quotes in Mr Toews article thus far, this one, by computer pioneer Alan Kay (whose accomplishments from the 60s to today are too numerous to mention here) has me stumped. So I’m going to have to go through it rather carefully.
I believe that Dr Kay is saying that there is something in common between a flower and AI, and that whatever that something is, it should make anyone in his (or I assume her) right mind feel inferior to both the flower and AI. I’m trying to think of what that intimidating commonality might be. All I can come up with is dogged determination towards pre-programmed goals. If that’s what Dr Kay is alluding too, I have all sorts of questions.
Flowers are certainly admirably single-minded (if they can be said to minded at all, which I think they can’t). A flower (and I’m speaking not just of the bloom but the whole plant) is a beautiful machine which pumps nutrient-bearing water from the ground, while using sun and photosynthesis to turn carbon dioxide into the mass of the plant’s pumping machinery. The bloom of many flowers is programmed to be colourful, shapely, and fragrant, sometimes to trick insects into attempting to mate with them. This co-evolved deception aides the plant’s reproduction, and thus evolution. Plants can do all sorts of other amazing things to continue to thrive and evolve while coping with change, like abandoning their reproductive strategies to become hermaphrodites and fertilise themselves.
I love flowers, not just because of their wondrous machinery, but for their beauty. I imagine a part of that appreciation may be due to some evolutionary advantage for human beings feeling joy in some colours and scents. However, I think attributing human aesthetic appreciation merely to survival advantage undermines the importance of human intellectual and cultural evolution. And that evolutionary system is, in fact, far more complex than biological evolution.
I am not envious of flowers, because they do not think. As I noted, flowers have powerful adaptive strategies to deal with adversity, but those strategies are not thoughts. Flowers are indeed dogged in their pursuit of the single goal of survival and reproduction. But while they can inspire the ideas of lovers and poets, they do not participate in any evolution of thoughts, as all people do.
Human beings do far more than simply strive to survive. We cooperate and create. In that way, we have harnessed the power of emergence in complex systems to become something more than cogs in the machinery of some crude survival-of-the-fittest game. We evolve qualities, not just our quantity, not just quantitative evaluations of our “fitness.” As I said in the previous comment, qualities are real, first-class objects in the world. They are thoughts that we, as human beings, create and evolve. This is not a hallmark card; it is science; it is a real aspect of the physical universe, as much as DNA, black holes, or entropy.
I believe Dr Kay is correct in his comparison of flowers to AI because some instances of the latter are becoming intractable, complex entities, as single “minded” in their pursuits as flowers are in surviving. However, AIs also do not participate as full-fledged, active partners in the ongoing evolution of thoughts. They can inspire human thought evolution (as they did in the fighter aircraft manoeuvre work I describe in my book Rage). But their mechanical single-mindedness is the very reason they cannot play a fully active role in human societies.
Overlooking this distinction, beginning to envy machines for their fast, accurate, and relentless pursuit of simple-minded objectives, and entrusting those machines with vital human decisions, is dangerous, and invites a dystopia worthy of a sci-fi film. In fact, this plant/machine comparison is probably the reason Skynet isn’t the only kind of overlord used in the dystopian metaphors of sci-fi. Remember Day of the Triffids?
Just to be clear, I am in no way dissing flowers. As I write this, I am looking out on my garden admiring new blossoms of clematis, but while I am thankful for them, I do not envy them. Instead, I’d say that flowers (and AIs) should envy us. Or they would, if they could only think.