Intelligence is not what makes us valuable.
Today I received an email from Google letting me know that they are discontinuing their coding competitions, forever. There might be several motives for this move, but there is one obvious reason for why these competitions will probably never start again: Eventually large language models like AlphaCode or GPT-4 will break the game.
While this should have been completely expected, I was still left in a mild state of shock. During my computer science degree, these types of coding challenges were a big thing. They represented a skill that I honed and was somewhat proud of. And yet, in a few years this skill might be as obsolete as being good at reading paper maps. And while chess has survived AI’s dominance over humans, I doubt that coding competitions will be so lucky. After all, who wants to do dynamic programming, JUST for the sake of it?
Of course, this is just a drop of water in the ocean of similar sobering experiences that most of us 8 billion humans already have, or have yet to go through. The more time goes by, the more it looks like the rising tide of AI will reach every last peak of human capabilities. This realization probably leaves a lot of people with thoughts like ‘What will I be good for in the future?’ I think we have to face the likely possibility that, eventually, humanity will be completely useless, in the sense that there will not be any task left that requires humans to accomplish anything.
This might be a hard pill to swallow, but it could help us come to the realization that we are not valuable because of how smart we are, but we are valuable because we have an experience of the world. (Although I remain agnostic as to how interlinked the capacity for subjective experience and intelligence are.) We matter because we have phenomenal consciousness. We are pockets of the universe experiencing itself. I can’t conceive of anything being of any value without these pockets. Intelligence is only ‘good’ if it leads to conscious experiences being better. In that sense, intelligence was always just a means to an end, but I think we got too caught up thinking that it defines us.
One phrase I’ve often heard from parents / teachers growing up is something along the lines of “Everyone has their own special talents and strengths.” While this may be true, I think it completely misses the point when it comes to self-worth. No one’s worth should be measured by what they can do, but by their capacity to experience.
While AI will initially strip us of our meaning by making our skills obsolete, we might realize that what remains is that which should have mattered the most from the start: Our capacity to experience love, sadness, colors, itches, warmth, headaches, the smell of coffee, etc.
To avoid sounding like some wanna-be spiritual guru who has already figured out life, I should say that I’m definitely someone who suffers from the affliction of connecting self-worth to what I’m good at. I often catch myself trying to rationalize why my skills will somehow stay important in the future, just to feel better about myself. Maybe I am one of the people who needs AGI to wash over us the most.
Disclaimer: Max Tegmark expresses a very similar idea in his 2017 book Life 3.0. This is also where I got the metaphor of the rising water from. I’m not sure to what extent I’m just repeating what he said, but it’s been many years since I read the book.
