Comment by vdietrich
4 days ago
Oxytocin is one of the oldest molecules in the world — it created sexual reproduction, a very long time ago. "Our capacity to relate and to care for one another" looks a lot like oxytocin, which therefore belongs to all of us who reproduce sexually. There is nothing stopping artificial intelligence from making us humans return to "relate and to care for one another." Hugging, talking, laughing, dancing. Trusting, being trustworthy. Sex, relationships.
You know, I think Yuval Harari hit the nail on the head when defining humans as those mammals capable of gathering in groups of more than just a few dozen, by being able to believe in abstractions — like "a country," "being a fan of a soccer team," a religion, etc. Harari mentions how difficult it would be to keep forty thousand chimpanzees well-behaved in a stadium, and yet we humans do that every single weekend.
Which abstractions will we believe in, with or without AI? I think this part isn't really under attack. Nor is our capacity to relate to one another under attack.
So both our relating-animal side (oxytocin) and our human side (believing in shared abstractions) remain untouched. They aren't being replaced by anything.
What are AIs — much like what ChatGPT did with mathematics — actually replacing?
Something else. But neither our capacity to connect with one another nor our ability to gather in the thousands, millions, or billions around abstractions. Just my two cents.
Great article!
(My thoughts on similar topics: https://blog.vladi.dev/en/articles/mudando-o-ponto-de-equili...)
Your assessment is depressing -- the thing that makes us special has gone from "thinking", "curiosity", "understanding the world" to "we don't kill each other when gathered in a stadium".
That's a fair point of view. It's Yuval Noah Harari definition, not mine (Sapiens book, 2nd chapter):
"Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories."
(...)
"You could never pack a thousand chimpanzees into Times Square, the United Nations, the Vatican or the New York Stock Exchange. You would get pandemonium. By contrast, thousands of Sapiens regularly congregate in such places, and they usually produce orderly networks and trade rather than violence and chaos."
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And the passage I recalled from memory is actually from a TED Talk ("Why humans run the world", 2015 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzj7Wg4DAbs&t=231s)
"If you try to crowd 100,000 chimpanzees into Wembley Stadium, or into Oxford Street, or into a church, or into a school, you will get complete chaos. But you can put 100,000 humans together in Wembley Stadium, and they will usually behave reasonably well, watch the match together and sing along."
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But I’m not giving up on your celebration of our curiosity.
Speaking of curiosity, I’d bring Peter Gray and his "Free to Learn" book into the conversation.
Take a look at the second of the five characteristics of play that Peter Gray proposes:
"Play is activity that, from the conscious perspective of the player, is done for its own sake more than for some reward outside of the activity itself. In other words, it is behavior in which means are more valued than ends.
When people are not playing, what they value most are the results of their actions. [...] When people are not playing, they typically opt for the least effortful way of achieving their goal.
In play, however, all this is reversed. In play, attention is focused on the means more than the ends, and players do not necessarily look for the easiest routes to achieving the ends. Play often has goals, but the goals are experienced as part and parcel of the activity, not as the primary reason for the activity. Goals in play are subordinate to the means for achieving them."
Using Gray’s definition, mathematicians might actually be mourning the loss of play — the process itself, the thinking, the exploring — rather than "just" reaching the final result (via ChatGPT).
Is this a valid way of looking at it through Peter Gray's lens?
Cooperate to what end? If we succeed at obsoleting thinking, what would the collaboration be about?
(Also, I suspect if you take 100,000 humans, with no explanation, and force them against their will into Wembley stadium, you'll also get chaos.)
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