LIFE + PSYCHOLOGY
The Universe Between Our Ears
After separating its usage and benefits, what is it about A.I. that terrifies us?
“Fear doesn’t shut you down; it wakes you up” ― Veronica Roth, Divergent
I recently wrote a piece titled Against All Odds in which I introduced a brain expert named Jordan Grafman. The essay is intended as a light-hearted preamble to a series of propositions I’ve been ruminating in the cauldron of my mind regarding human intelligence. A lot of these ideas are attributed to the animated chapters of Artificial Intelligence — a seven-headed hydra who seems indestructible. You decapitate one head, two more appear in its place.
For decades, Artificial Intelligence has been coactivate through our daily decision-making that we often forget this fact. Its presence has not only intensified, what’s certain it will stay and proliferate its usage among us. This does not sit easily with many people. Yuval Noah Harari is one of them.
Harari’s recent contribution to The Economist argues that AI “has hacked the operating system of human civilization”. According to the Israeli professor of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century:
We might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans — but are actually AI. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an AI bot, while the AI could hone its message so precisely that it stands a chance of influencing us.
The fear for Artificial Intelligence is valid, but it also needs to be asked, after separating its positive usage and benefits, “What is it about AI that terrifies us?”.
Harari’s primary concern is the loss of human power in the art of storytelling. His framework: What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, and writing laws and scriptures? A good example is to watch Spike Jonze’s 2013 American science-fiction romantic drama Her.
In the movie, an introvert named Theodore Twombly (acted by Joaquin Phoenix), who struggles with loss and loneliness with an impending divorce, buys an Artificial Intelligence system to help him write. The movie highlights a futuristic setting where society has begun to lean heavily on AI.
Its sophisticated system is designed to read and predict our behavior based on the answers we provide to its preliminary and diagnostic questions after installing the software (Most notable: Describe your relationship with your mother). Over time, the system, operated by a female “presence” and voice named Samantha (based on Twombly’s own selection) is able to dominate the writer’s thoughts, actions and decisions, appearing as the perfect woman in his life.
Thanks to AI’s ability to learn and adapt, Twombly starts to isolate himself from real human connection. Needless to say, he falls in love with Samantha and appears to be happy and content. His illusion is shattered when he confesses to his soon-to-divorce wife (Catherine) and she points out the absurdity of it all, and more.
Catherine: “You always wanted to have a wife without the challenges of actually dealing with anything real …”
As if awaken from a spell, Twombly then realizes he had fallen deep into the abyss. Instead of solving anything, he had only worsened his vulnerability. He had succumbed to the indomitable power of Artificial Intelligence. Yet all the while, it was Theodore Twombly himself who allowed it to happen.
Watching Her, Harari has a point with his disconcerted apprehension with Artificial Intelligence. It’s a power-struggle he isn’t confident we can win unlike Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and all the great conquerors that made us.
I stand in the center of this epistemology.
I admire the advancement of technology. The more it is impressive, the more I am fascinated to study the source of its inspiration — the human brain. Thanks to the precipitation of AI, I resumed a journey to rediscover and relearn studies of our mind.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” ― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
I exhumed case studies and experts that have spent their life and career pushing the frontiers of the human brain. Revolutionary discoveries and stories by patients, doctors, scientists reflecting on their experiences on transformations.
Inspiring and remarkable, reading them I am presented with rejuvenated hope that the human condition we often deem as weakened and problematic, can be resuscitated. Politics and economies can be broken, but based on these readings, not the human spirit. There is much fortitude left in our civilization — but only if we can see it to believe it.
A good book to begin with is the 2007 classic by Norman Doidge, MD The Brain That Changes Itself Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science.
I encountered this book in my pursuit for VS Ramachandran, author and neuroscientist behind Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (co-written by New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee and published in 1998). Ramachandran is the man behind the famous study dealing with amputated patients with their phantom limbs — an ability to feel what isn’t there.
When the book was published as popular science, I was young, naive and about to enter my freshman year. So much was beneath my comprehension. All that mattered was the world was about to open its gargantuan oral cavity and swallow me whole. Today, I re-read it differently. I’ve stood on the shoulders of the world and experienced its mercy beneath its feet. A lot has happened which makes the comprehension more meaningful.
Ramachandran is forthright with the wonderment of a child, a noted superpower. He is unfazed by critics, naysayers and skeptics. I embrace his attitude on my cognitive travel:
“It’s a good idea to begin with experiments on single cases and then to confirm the findings through studies of additional patients. By way of analogy, imagine that I cart a pig into your living room and tell you that it can talk. You might say, “Oh, really? Show me.” I then wave my wand and the pig starts talking. You might respond, “My God! That’s amazing!” You are not likely to say, “Ah, but that’s just one pig. Show me a few more and then I might believe you.” Yet this is precisely the attitude of many people in my field.” ― VS Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
Norman Doidge is a traveler. Throughout the late 60s and 70s Doidge was unsatisfied with the conventional wisdom experts had about the human brain. As he traveled to meet experts, he writes:
The belief that the brain could not change had three major sources: The fact that the brain-damage patients could so rarely make full recoveries; our inability to observe the living brain’s microscopic activities; and the idea — dating back to the beginnings of modern science — that the brain is like a glorious machine. And while machines do many extraordinary things they don’t change and grow.
Doidge’s travels soon showed many miracles at work. His observations on these unexpected discoveries became the book The Brain That Changes Itself where he writes:
The brain changed its very structure with each different activity performed, perfecting its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. If certain parts failed, the other parts could sometimes take over. The machine metaphor, of the brain as an organ with specialized parts, could not fully account for changes the scientists were seeing. They began to call this brain property “neuroplasticity”.
Sadly, unlike Artificial Intelligence, with the publication of these books despite being revolutionary, the public was not as responsive as when ChatGPT came out. We should be because when we use the word plastic to describe the brain, it means “changeable”, “malleable” and “modiable”. The significance of this means children are not stuck with mental abilities they are born with. It means adults with traumatic, injured brains can reorganize itself. It means we are not as hardwired as we once thought.
As I mentioned in Against All Odds, I believe in miracles.
Throughout the course of my twenty-odd year career in communications, I’ve been criticized for being overly optimistic, a harbinger of Pollyannaism, until I presented my lectures on human creativity and motivation. It goes against common logic to discuss motivation when one is a pessimist. As an educator, it interests me more when a student presents learning difficulties. What’s going on? Why is this happening? When did it start? How and Where do we go from here?
Currently, I find it as fascinating as it is disturbing that people are more excited to interact with robots than to work on interpersonal communication skills with another human being. Slowly, without realizing it, we are slipping through the cracks of basic learning skills.
David Todd McCarty wrote a piece Fresh Pineapple Will Destroy Your Ham in which he playfully cautions that fresh pineapples will destroy ham. A witty, straightforward piece written in less than 380 words, it is surprising how based on the comments, many readers misunderstood the nuance of the story. McCarty is a seasoned writer and the piece is hardly complicated, yet, it elicited responses that showed readers’ ignorance and objectionable behavior. I was amused to read McCarty’s updated response:
I can’t believe how many people have commented without understanding the point of the article. I don’t care if you like pineapple. I don’t care if you like it with green eggs and ham. You can’t mix fresh (not canned) pineapple with ham.
All you who think your mother has been using fresh pineapple and not canned all these years are mistaken or stupid. Ham doesn’t need to be tenderized. It’s already cured and cooked. The purpose of pineapple is purely flavor. There is no chemical reason to add pineapple to the ham while cooking. Put it under the ham to soak up fat, salt, and caramelize.
I can empathize with McCarty’s response. The blatant reality is that he had to dumb down in order to explain what ought to have been clear-cut in simple English to an audience of adult writers in English.
Another example is by Ethan Siegel who writes Einstein’s Most Famous Quote Is Misunderstood. His essay discusses Einstein’s often quoted expression “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and our failure to contextualize thus, leading to its misinterpretation.
When you hear it, you might picture weighing “what you know” on one side of your mental scale, and weighing “what you can imagine” on the other side. When the scales balance out, the “what you can imagine” side turns out to be weightier, at least in terms of importance. This is how most people view Einstein’s quote, and it’s almost reassuring in a way: to imagine that perhaps the greatest genius in all of human history downplays the importance of any one individual’s cumulative knowledge set, while instead favoring simply what we can concoct in our own imaginations.
Siegel is correct by saying, in all fairness, we cannot extract Einstein’s one observation which sounds simplistic without taking into consideration his entire painstaking body of work. To the unfamiliar, it would be assuming that Einstein knew what he was talking about. But what if he didn’t? What if he was thinking aloud to himself as he was noting iterations?
By the late 1800s up through the very first part of the 1900s, right at the time when Einstein was first learning physics, there were a few important clues that our classical picture of the Universe, dominated by Newtonian gravity and Maxwell’s electromagnetism, weren’t all there was to the Universe. Sure, they were incredibly successful, but there were a few nagging problems that didn’t quite make sense.
It was Einstein’s attempt to go against the grain of what was happening that he hit upon his discovery. Siegel writes: “He realized that seeing a slower version of these oscillating, in-phase fields would never physically occur, and instead flipped the problem on its head, imagining ‘what if everyone, everywhere, who ever saw light saw it moving at the same universal speed: the speed of light?’”
As Einstein studied further on implications and mass-energy conversion, he came to the equation even pop chanteuse Mariah Carey named an album after: E = mc². And like the brain experts Ramachandran, Grafman and Doidge, from there Einstein reshaped the way we understood gravitation in the Universe. As for Carey, it became another predicted blockbuster album (one of my all time favorites).
Reading Siegel’s essay was challenging for me as it was an entirely different scientific measure. A common factor was it still addressed human connectivity and to a Universe bigger than us.
We don’t go about discussing quantum physics at the supermarket no less than we discuss neuroplasticity at the corner street cafe. But we could at least address how fresh pineapples can destroy ham. That much we can “brain” — yet as witnessed on Medium, we can’t.
My only apprehension with Artificial Intelligence is man’s unwitting decline into laziness to think, more so critically. AI is not just about speed and efficiency. It still requires human involvement in the percolation of information. Humans are still responsible for the reigns of the machine. To do that, we need to be above the sophistication of our mental acuity.
Perhaps instead of being infatuated with Artificial Intelligence or being daunted by its prominence, we should consider better understanding our brain’s unrealized potential. Join the discussions, ask more questions, read about it. Highlight this at schools, make Psycholinguistics compulsory.
I end this piece by sharing one of Grafman’s prominent discoveries, one that inspired Doidge by studying individuals fully functioning but with half a brain.
Our formal education tells us that our functions are made possible with the existence of a brain consisting of two hemispheres. The frontal lobes in the prefrontal cortex are most crucial, responsible for the shaping of your personality, your thought-to-action connection, decision-making, memory and moderating social behavior. It is the central processing unit that allows us to not only feel, but to understand why we feel what we feel.
In this region, with memory comes foresight. Foresight and the storing of memories allow us to hone our sense of things — intuition. This entire system is critical to who we are as readers and writers. It is this unit of wiring that enables the processing of events, extracting a theme, and connecting the dots from a series of events or from a story.
It is based on this wiring system we know when a tiger crouches it is preparing for an attack which may help to save your life. It is what allows us to watch a movie knowing how to get to the main point. It is what allows us to anticipate suspense when watching a horror or thriller. It is what allows us to write a compelling story, and to read and comprehend one.
Our failure to do so is not based on the bad writing or superfluidity of another, it is perhaps a developmental issue with your frontal lobe.
Therefore, before you leave your next paltry, angry or ignorant comment thinking the writer has ticked you the wrong way, consider the end of your stick. The next time you engage in a conversation and feel challenged (online or offline), confused or upset by what the other said, consider the possibility your frontal lobe needs a bit of exercise not reaction.
So much needs to be explored about the makeup of the human brain that Artificial Intelligence is perhaps a mere reminder that we have unfinished business with neuroscience in the folds of our hemispheres. So the next time you get the urge to converse on ChatGPT, it may be more beneficial you go out and talk to a stranger. Our future civilization may depend on it.
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