Letter #9: Humans are Underrated

What are machines for?

Dad,

Your latest email was streamed directly into the wifi chip I had implanted the other day in my brain stem (and yours, while you were sleeping). As a result the exchange also briefly opened a neural window into your consciousness, which explains why the dink dink song from Spaceballs was playing on loop in the background the whole time. How do you stand that all day?

Actually, though we haven’t in fact combined our mind files, we might as well have—since the subjects you raise so often pick up right where my thoughts leave off. As luck or Providence would have it, I’m reading Elon Musk’s biography right now. And there’s a moment right in the middle that really caught my attention. Two things happen: first, Elon starts to get terrified that humans are going to be outclassed or exterminated by machines, Terminator-style. So he helps found OpenAI, which helps build ChatGPT, so it can...outclass and exterminate humans, Terminator-style? The whole enterprise has a bit of an Underpants Gnome vibe.

But in seriousness I do think Musk is sincerely trying, at least, to preserve what he understands as humanity. Because the other thing that happens right around the same time is, he has this realization on the Tesla assembly lines: humans are actually better than factory machines at doing a lot of the jobs that have been assigned to robots. He even tweeted about it, probably to shareholders’ chagrin: “humans are underrated.”

Just so. But as far as I can tell, Musk didn’t then apply that insight back onto his AI endeavors. He hasn’t yet asked why one workaday old human, swiveling one boring old head with two eyes on top of one neck, sees a living picture of the world that takes scores of high-def cameras to even sort of mimic. Yet to my mind this is the essential fact: our humanity is good, is miraculous, is the point of it all. That’s why we started out building all these farkakteh machines in the first place: to enhance our humanity, not to outstrip it.

And then of course the machines themselves overawed us, and we forgot what we were doing. You’re absolutely right: the logic of consumption, and of idolatry, will blind us to the necessity of being human and will send us careening into a hellscape if we let it.

But I think you’re also right that tech enthusiasts and skeptics alike are asking the wrong question. It’s not “why should we keep humans around?” We need to flip that on its head: it’s “why do we want machines around?” They answer to us. This technology is going to emerge, no question. Which means we need a rigorous way to judge our use of it. I’d propose this as a rubric, to start: does it help us do the job of being human? Until we know what that job is, we’ll never get anywhere good.

Spencer