THOSE NOW fearful of AI would seem to assume that human intelligence has built a civilisation equipped with philosophy, art, and labour saving, which AI will now destroy.
The embarrassment here is that human intelligence is already killing things. Tied to the profit motive, we’re disrupting ourselves to death.
With an original degree in maths and physics, then as a science journalist in the late 1960s, I came to fear where scientists naively led. Nervousness with computing power back then was captured in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
But as I left science behind, I learned not to over-rate rationality, and also to accept that some research is genuinely useful, such as warnings of environmental collapse. And just maybe computers will opt for a more fact-based civilisation. They might even understand intelligence better than we seem to do.
Intelligence is over-rated, for one thing (nothing that carries society off a cliff seems smart).
Referring back to Douglas Hofstadter’s essay, “The shallowness of Google Translate” (The Atlantic, January, 2018), New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed alarm that Hofstadter had recently changed his mind, and expected “human beings are soon going to be eclipsed.”
Brooks admitted to being shaken, yet remained an “AI limitationist”, believing that:
while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children all around the world, or summarizing meetings, it is no match for human intelligence. It doesn’t possess understanding, self-awareness, concepts, emotions, desires, a body or biology.
The key point for me is the lack of “desires, a body or biology”. AI is a machine relatively detached from the world, whereas human intelligence is enmeshed in physiologies and ecologies. I go further and say that human intelligence is essentially directed at eating better.
But that’s before the powerful proclaim their ideologies, which have for two centuries been money-making.
If they are truly super-intelligent, big computers might even read my Meals Matter: A radical economics through gastronomy (2020), and wind back capitalism.
When AI reaches page 6, it will learn that Intelligence (as rationality) belongs to the human “second brain”, with the gut microbiota being the “first brain”. We are directed by our appetites, and other interoception, with the second brain helping find and organise meals.
Thinking has to remain thoroughly embedded in nature, and not destroyed by “superior” powers. If it knows what it’s doing, Intelligence will support thoughtful, pleasurable, healthy, well-resourced and sustainable meals.
Meals Matter 