Okay, the year is 2023 and it feels like the future you imagined in the 90s is arriving. Your social feeds are inundated with ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, the future of AI, every big company’s next big step! Should you be afraid, or impressed, or adaptable? It feels like just about every angle has been tackled. Yet, we feel there is a missing link in the conversation – the marriage between AI and emotions.
Only in recent years have we focused on the importance of emotion in the health of our society – from individual wellness to success in business. At last, mental wellbeing has been ushered to the forefront of the productivity conversation. Yet, whilst we’ve come a long way from industrial-revolution-style practices, its effects on structures and the human psyche can still be felt in modern society. Generations of people are actively working to unlearn old constructs of their value being tied to their output. And now it seems we are on the cusp of repeating these mistakes.
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence we have negated a critical component of human intelligence – emotional intelligence.
Emotion is the indicator that propels us forward. Desire, curiosity, satisfaction, pleasure are the determinants of why we live the way we live, why we create, why we invent. AI, which cannot feel, therefore has no true desire to go beyond the what-is; to think in parallel to the data it’s been fed. So yes, while AI can use millions of data points to form human-like mannerisms, it can interpret emotions but it cannot feel them. AI, no matter how sensory it might appear, is limited to its programming to just that – appear sensory. It cannot go deeper, traversing the depth of passion, despair, love, or the myriad other emotions that propel us towards truly new creation. It cannot know, viscerally, the desire to breathe crisp morning air or taste the perfect balance of flavours in a burger. Undeniably, it will do unique, amazing, novel things but it cannot do this.
It’s exciting and unquestionable how advanced AI will become (and yes, we did cry watching the movie HER), or the leverage it will give us to become more advanced. But it can never be us. It can only serve this magical thing we call existence, it cannot replace it. And so we come to the ultimate point being that existence itself is valuable. And from this intrinsically valuable existence, we derive human emotion and expression in its many creative forms. So no matter what machine learning can or can’t do – there will always be a value in existing and thriving.
Consider this, one of the most famous writers in history, J.R.R Tolkien notoriously took seven years to publish the Hobbit and another sixteen to produce the sequel. During this time came an interwoven string of love, loss, friendship, world wars and perfectionism. All of which, to some degree, impacted the works of one of the greatest fantasy novels in history. This is the intrinsically creative expression of the human perspective that moves us, this is the thing that AI cannot replicate.
Just as humans formularize everything from business to producing music, AI will gain and surpass our ability to do this. It can replicate for efficiency, reproduce what already exists, or recreate through unique combinations. Yet it’s the internal flow and tousle of emotion that produces life-altering and transformative creations. The felt experience of that emotional ride cannot be artificially created.
The thing AI cannot tap into, is the ability to go deeper into the process of creation, beyond the inputs, programs, data points, down to the inherent, ever-expanding human. Whether a business invention, or art that normalizes certain human conditions or the deep desire for interplanetary travel as an alternative livelihood.
Will Artificial Intelligence impact knowledge industries? Of course. Any significant, widely adopted technology is bound to shake up many industries. Society will adapt and rebase, as we have done throughout time. This does not mean the need for our work, our invention or creation will not be valuable. Because the things we create hold an unwavering inherent value.
It feels like this is an important place to show that these are not idealistic concepts. We do not underestimate the power that AI does in fact and will in fact have over the human psyche. Knowing that the technology is not really consciousness is not the same as feeling that it is.
Meaning that while AI itself cannot feel, it can communicate as if it does. Which means we perceive it as having emotional capacity in our interactions. This appearance of sentience and the technology’s power overall to impact our driving force of creation – human emotion – means that we must be deliberate about this marriage between AI and emotions.
Which is why we invite the conversation toward a future of Artificial Intelligence that incorporates thinking on the magnificent, unique mechanism that is human emotion. If AI is here to advance our society, we don’t programme it to be stupid or ignorant. We program it to contain the best elements of the human brain. Thus, should we not program it to use its intelligence for purposes that advance the emotional wellbeing of the world? Where it is programmed towards outcomes of Love exclusively! An elixir that could serve our planet as a whole and mobilize an advanced, compassionate civilization. The power of AI allows us to scale the integration of highest values, emotional wellbeing and intellectual pursuits. We could create a generation of AI leveraged to move humanity forward, and with significantly fewer lower order values needing to be unlearned later.
Advancements that serve our highest values is how we define Emergent technology.
