🧠 Is AI the Fourth Great Humiliation?

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Welcome back AI prodigies!

In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 💥Three Original Humiliations

• 🤖A Fourth Humiliation?

• 🤲Redefining Human Identity

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Hallucinations: When AI Models present false information as fact, often in a confident or matter-of-fact tone

• Large Language Models (LLMs): AI Models pre-trained on vast amounts of data to generate human-like text.

• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): A theoretical concept where AI Models achieve human-level learning, perception, and cognitive ability.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

Humans are exceptionally powerful. As Earth’s dominant species, few forces truly humble us. But when something does challenge our self-image, it often exposes deep truths about who we are.

In his book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Austrian Neurologist Sigmund Freud outlined three scientific discoveries that he called the Great Humiliations of Humanity:

⦿ 1️⃣ 🔭Earth isn’t the center of the universe.

⦿ 2️⃣ 🦍We’re animals, not just divine creations.

⦿ 3️⃣ 💭We don’t control most of our thoughts.

So, how did the Great Humiliations of Humanity come to be? Could AI be the next Great Humiliation? If so, what does it reveal about us?

💥THREE ORIGINAL HUMILIATIONS

⦿ 1️⃣ 🔭Cosmological Humiliation.

In the 2nd century, Roman Astronomer Claudius Ptolemy proposed the Geocentric Model, where Earth occupied the center of the universe. This worldview shaped not only astronomy but also theology and philosophy. The Catholic Church soon adopted this doctrine, with famous Italian Priest Thomas Aquinas affirming the Geocentric Model as divine order.

But in 1543, Polish Polymath Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, proposing a Heliocentric Model where the Sun occupied the center of the universe. Though initially met with skepticism, it gained strength through German Mathematician Johannes Kepler, who described planetary orbits as ellipses, meaning the path a planet took around the Sun wasn’t a perfect circle but an elongated oval. Additionally, Italian Astronomer Galileo Galilei’s telescope observations showed moons orbiting Jupiter, proving that not everything orbits the Earth. The Catholic Church resisted fiercely. In 1633, Galileo was prosecuted and forced to recant.

But in 1687, English Polymath Sir Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica (PM), where his Three Laws of Motion and Law of Universal Gravitation mathematically explained not only how objects move on Earth but also how the Moon orbits the Earth and how the Earth orbits the Sun. The Heliocentric Model forced humanity to accept that Earth didn’t sit upon the universe’s throne.

⦿ 2️⃣ 🦍Biological Humiliation.

In 1859, English Biologist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, introducing the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Darwin argued that all species, including humans, share common ancestry and adapt gradually over time, undermining the belief in a divinely created, immutable human form. Religious leaders like the English Bishop of the Church of England, Samuel Wilberforce, denounced it as an affront to divine purpose. At the famous 1860 Oxford Evolution Debate, Wilberforce clashed with English Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, arguing that random genetic variations couldn’t explain the complexity of life. However, as evidence mounted through the 20th century, the scientific truth became clearer that humanity evolved through biological processes.

⦿ 3️⃣ 💭Psychological Humiliation.

In the early 20th century, Freud proposed that much of human thought lies in the unconscious beyond our awareness or control. In A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis, Freud declared, “The ego is not master in its own house,” challenging the Enlightenment Ideal that people are fully rational and in control of their minds. Freud proved that our unconscious fears, desires, and instincts shape our personality. To show this, Freud famously developed the Iceberg Theory, which metaphorically represents the mind’s three levels of awareness: the conscious (i.e., the tip of the iceberg), the preconscious (i.e., the ice just below the water’s surface), and the unconscious (i.e., the ice deeply submerged within the water).

🤖A FOURTH HUMILIATION?

⦿ 4️⃣ 🦾Technological Humiliation?

Many suggest that the next great humiliation will be technological, brought on by AGI. Today’s AI Models already perform skilled abilities we once reserved for specialized humans like lawyers, physicians, or developers.

For example, a small study from the University of Virginia (UVA) found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT, powered by GPT-4, outperformed physicians at diagnosing conditions.

It involved 50 physicians who were given an hour to examine six medical cases with detailed patient scenarios of symptoms, health history, and relevant test results.

The 50 physicians were divided into two groups:

1. Group A: Physicians using traditional diagnostic methods.

2. Group B: Physicians using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help them.

Group B would input the medical cases into OpenAI’s ChatGPT to incorporate the conversational chatbot’s suggestions into their diagnosis.

The graders were medical experts who only knew each physician’s diagnosis without knowing whether they were from Group A, Group B, or just OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Group A achieved 74% accuracy, Group B achieved 76% accuracy, and just OpenAI’s ChatGPT achieved 90% accuracy.

This small study challenges assumptions that conversational chatbots are just there to assist. Instead, they’re colleagues with legitimate opinions.

🤲REDEFINING HUMAN IDENTITY

AI doesn’t currently rival the depth of Copernicus’s Heliocentric Model, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or Freud’s Iceberg Theory. But AI does end our monopoly on problem-solving.

We’ve long tied human worth to what we can do: reason, create, invent, and diagnose. AI’s encroachment challenges that. If our collective self-worth depends on outperforming machines, it’s fragile. Instead, we must ground identity in what machines can’t do.

If our cognitive skills are no longer rare, we must prize other forms of value: wisdom, beauty, moral courage, and self-development. These forms of value are impossible to quantify, but they inspire us to live and entertain us when we tire.

The most unsettling aspect of today’s LLMs isn’t that they work; it’s that we don’t fully understand how they work. An LLM is often referred to as a Black Box that requires large amounts of high-quality datasets and computational resources to generate outputs. It’s not always clear why LLMs generate a specific output. Opening up the Black Box doesn’t help either because LLMs think before generating an output, which appears as a series of numbered lists called Neural Activations without a clear meaning.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

As AI encroaches on our cognitive skills, we must rethink what defines our worth. Practically, we should focus on applying judgment in messy, ambiguous situations where context matters. Philosophically, we must shift our sense of self-worth from competence to character. If AI can mimic our competence, we must double down on our values, relationships, and capacity to improve.

📒FINAL NOTE

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