🧠 Why Is AI So Polarizing? A Philosophical Perspective.

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In today’s Sunday Special:

• 📜The Prelude

• 💭Reflecting on Previous Ontologies

• 🏟GenAI Enters The Arena

• 🔑Key Takeaway

Read Time: 7 minutes

🎓Key Terms

• Pantheon: a temple dedicated to all the gods.

• Hearth: A brick, stone, or concrete area in front of a fireplace.

• Animism: Attributing a soul to animals, plants, or inanimate objects.

• Ontological Shock: The state of being forced to question your worldview.

• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): AI systems that perform tasks as well as humans and exhibit human traits such as intuition, sentience, consciousness, critical reasoning, and emotional awareness.

• Generative AI (GenAI): Uses AI models trained on text, image, audio, video, or code data to generate new content.

🩺 PULSE CHECK

📜THE PRELUDE

As GenAI spends more time in the public spotlight, the polarization around it only intensifies. Other technological revolutions generated enthusiasm and skepticism, but most didn’t produce such extreme short-term predictions of imminent utopia or an inevitable apocalypse. This is partly due to GenAI’s perceived potential. Though mass job automation is a valid concern, its ability to allegedly replicate human actions such as writing, thinking, and speaking is more notable. It forces us to rethink our assumptions about ourselves and the world. When our perception of reality is threatened, we can’t think or act rationally. Philosophers call this Ontological Shock. AI challenges our long-held understanding of how stuff works.

Most of us live in a condition of reasonable ontological security, in which things unfold more or less as we expect them to. Anthony Giddens, one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, describes ontological security as “a sense of order and continuity regarding an individual’s experiences.” The sun rises every morning to reveal our house in the same place as yesterday. Our family greets us. The bus follows the same route to work. Friends don’t suddenly turn into enemies. Our most fundamental ontological assumptions are so integral to our worldview that they’re not obvious. These deeply held assumptions are like eyeglasses worn twenty-four seven (i.e., “24/7”); we see the world through them but don’t often take them off and inspect them. Much of the discussion around GenAI is devoted to preserving our ontological security. To understand how AI advancements may challenge our assumptions, we must compare them to those of previous civilizations. Then, we might realize that our modern ontology must be rewritten in the age of GenAI.

💭REFLECTING ON PREVIOUS ONTOLOGIES

How did individuals in the past understand their world? What was the world like for a hunter-gatherer, Roman soldier, or Christian in the Middle Ages? What kind of civilizations did each society contain? This is a vast topic, so let’s not delve too deeply. We’ll focus on the evolution of religion, particularly in Rome, and how it relates to humanity’s perception of self.

Hunter-gatherer societies often lived in a world illuminated by Animism. In the animist belief, spirit and intelligence were ingrained in many natural world features. Trees, waterfalls, mountains, and animals were spiritual beings that had a meaningful relationship with humans. Even artifacts like weapons or cooking utensils could absorb and refract their owner’s spiritual power.

By the time of Roman civilization, the realm of the sacred had retreated from forests to temples and Hearths. Nevertheless, the Pantheon remained extensive and varied, with dozens of significant gods and hundreds of minor deities. These ranged from the twelve principal gods (e.g., Jupiter, Juno, Mars, etc.) to regional deities and humble deities. There was no strict hierarchy, single orthodoxy, or universal creed; beliefs varied by region, profession, and stage of life. Beliefs outside the Roman world were quickly incorporated into the Pantheon. A fisherman from Roman Syria would worship different gods than a merchant from Roman Gaul.

Humans occupied a distinct and unique ontological niche in Roman religion. For example, they stood in a special relationship with the significant gods, who took an active interest in human affairs and could be swayed by the sacrifices and pleas of humans. However, the human niche was just one of many. For example, the regional deities and humble deities had their niche. They had a special protective relationship with the home and witnessed essential family occasions like births and marriages. For example, guardian deities like Lares protected the house and its inhabitants by warding off evil spirits and ensuring prosperity. While they weren’t as powerful as the significant gods, their role was crucial for the well-being of families. A Roman who neglected his Lares put his household in peril.

By the Middle Ages, the dominance of Christianity in Europe had given rise to a simple, hierarchical ontology. God, the almighty creator, stood at the pinnacle. Man, created in God's image, distinguished himself with his God-given soul. The natural world, including the animals, was below man and subject to him. Lesser spiritual entities appeared in the form of saints. This ontology was subject to a strict and rigid orthodoxy. Maintaining this orthodoxy required energetic policing of every aspect of the ontology. For example, the exact relationship of “God the Father” to “God the Son” was a significant source of religious controversy and conflict. Those who held the “wrong” view were branded as heretics.

For the last 150 years, the final boundary between humans and “things” has been under attack. In 1871, the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, observed the difference between human minds and higher animal minds was “certainly one of degree and not of kind.” In other words, Darwin observed a difference between human minds and higher animal minds. However, this difference was more about the degree of intelligence rather than a fundamental difference in kind.

The clear implication is that, at the most fundamental level, humankind has the same kind of being as physical things in general. The unsettling conclusion that we’re just “human clay” has been staunchly resisted. The fiercest fighting has occurred along the barricades of intelligence. Humans are demonstrably on the same continuum as animals regarding speed, strength, dexterity, and longevity. Only in the intangible field of intelligence might we retain some unique, god-like quality. However, GenAI might be challenging this notion.

🏟GENAI ENTERS THE ARENA

The emergence of GenAI has fueled Ontological Shock. We’re arguably down to two broad kinds of beings: humans and things. If AI models can “think,” then AI creates a fatal breach in the barrier between these categories and a final collapse in the distinction between humans and things. To be clear, we don’t believe AI models are there yet. But it’s early, and innovation is exponential, not linear. This collapse would profoundly undermine our notion of what it means to be human.

People are struggling to grasp the true nature of GenAI. Many respond by trying to maintain their existing understanding of reality. This resistance has fueled heated debates surrounding the role of GenAI in our society, with three viewpoints emerging as the dominant opinions:

1. AI is “just a thing” that’s not intelligent and will display some form of human intelligence.

2. AI has reached human capability and should be accepted as “one of us.”

3. We must resurrect the category of an absolute God. In this scenario, AI achieves AGI with capabilities that exceed those of humans. No one agrees on how to define this end-state, but this would create unprecedented Ontological Shock.

None of these alternatives is very satisfying, but a fourth category exists. Defining it requires greater ontological openness. We must abandon the rigid human and thing duality and accept that there can be a new kind of being. We must take seriously the possibility that GenAI is neither a thing, a human, or a God.

🔑KEY TAKEAWAY

Though creating a new category may seem like a frivolous philosophical act, it enables us to confront GenAI’s transformative potential with an open mind. Instead of haphazardly adopting AI, we can be more thoughtful about what we want. Robot nannies may be technologically feasible, but most people probably don’t want them. They encroach too much on our humanness. Many AI-powered products will. It’s up to us to manage the oncoming Ontological Shock by creating and enforcing boundaries.

📒FINAL NOTE

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