AI and humanity

AI is reshaping our world even as we speak. But the very name of the technology conceals an assumption, that there’s a single feature - ‘intelligence’ - that’s common to humans and machines. But is there? Can human intelligence be sheared off from other characteristically human features - our dependence on one another, our vulnerability, our mortality, our seemingly hard-wired reactivity to the human form - and recreated elsewhere? As shown by recent developments in the world of AI - the advent for example of AI ‘welfare experts’ – some clearly think the answer is yes. But can a machine really commiserate or apologize? Though we increasingly rely on AI as a source of information, can a machine even tell somebody something? That depends on what telling is: just getting information from one place to another, or partly about human relationship, like shaking hands or catching someone’s eye? Are we too ready to forget the person behind the information? 

In revisiting such questions, AI and humanity thinks afresh not just about what humans and machines can both do, but about what’s unique to us, and thus on how – as tools, or as peers - we and AI should share the human world.