AI vs. Bigger, Better Stories of Us

Like many of us, AI has been on my mind a lot lately.?

For the past two years, in fact, I’ve been serving as a member of the Linux Foundation’s Open Voice Network Synthetic Voice study group, where we’ve been exploring the potential social, cultural, and economic implications of emerging AI voice technologies and brainstorming ways to handle these powerful tools ethically and responsibly. Along with Jodi Krangle, Anne Ganguzza, and several others, I’ve been advocating for the rights and interests of voice actors in this brave new world.?

All this is to say, I’ve thought about, talked about, and read about these issues quite a bit but this week I read what may be the most substantial analysis of the real issues that our world currently faces, of which AI doomsday threats are but a symptom.

Alexander Beiner’s April 3 essay, “Reality Eats Culture For Breakfast: AI, Existential Risk and Ethical Tech” offers readers an insightful metaphor of fish farming to highlight why both AI and environmental regulation seem so impossible- it’s because at the root of both problems we have a culture problem. We live in a world that we view as being made of dead matter, and one from which we see ourselves as being somehow separate. If, however we could transform our worldview into one in which the universe is a conscious, living entity of which we are but one part, our outcomes might just be transformed too.

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“So what does a conscious universe have to do with AI and existential risk??It all comes back to whether our primary orientation is around quantity, or around quality. An understanding of reality that recognises consciousness as fundamental views the?quality of your experience?as equal to, or greater than, what can be quantified.

“Orienting toward quality, toward the?experience?of being alive, can radically change how we build technology, how we approach complex problems, and how we treat one another. It would challenge the Physicalist notion, and the technology birthed by it, that the quantity (of things) is more important than the quality of our experience. As Robert Pirsig, author of?Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, argued, a ‘metaphysics of quality’ would also open the door for ways of knowing made secondary by physicalism - the arts, the humanities, aesthetics and more - to contribute to our collective knowledge in a new way. This includes how we build AI.”

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“Our strategies for changing the world are often inspired by a culture created by a physicalist metaphysics. That’s why I propose that?metaphysics eats culture for breakfast. What we believe to be real and relevant is the most significant factor in the formation of culture, which in turn influences our thoughts and emotions, which in turn influence our values, which influence our institutions and political policies. The change has to happen at the deepest level if it’s going to have any significant impact on an issue as important as whether or not we go extinct.”

I find Beiner’s conclusions absolutely spot on. So many of the solutions I hear proposed to address our big challenges—be it AI, climate change, political corruption, or corporate greed—feel to me like putting band-aids on a complex fracture. Well-intended and all but ultimately inept because they just don’t go deep enough.?

What I believe we need right now more than anything else is a bigger, broader, better story of us.