Why AI may never replace you: In conversation with Dr Jaideep Chatterjee
?? Rahul C
The key to Artificial Intelligence never being able to replace us, is our 'natural intelligence'
“The Future is Now, Old Man”?
Speculations, glorifications and frustrations surrounding AI have flooded the online world. People either love AI, or hate it, or they just don’t know exactly how to feel about it.
ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and the likes have evoked unprecedented excitement as well as anxiety. Articulate essays are just a prompt away, and tonnes of cool art can be made with the click of a button now. In fact, any time I struggled while writing this article, I relied on ChatGPT myself!
In a sea of comments like “bruh ChatGPT is one month old and it can already do 80% of my job (crying emoji)” to “I’ve been drawing for 3 years and DALL-E spits out better art than I can”, we find ourselves swimming in some crucial questions:
How can I protect myself from becoming obsolete?
Is there anything that these machines can’t do anymore?
How can human intelligence keep up with human-made “intelligence”?
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In such a world, Professor (Dr.) Jaideep Chatterjee brings a rare sense of calm & certainty that AI cannot replace the human spirit.?
“Oh relax, this whole AI-scare thing happens every 20 years. No need to worry, no need!” Dr. Chatterjee rejoices with a firm faith in the uniqueness of human intelligence.
Prof Jaideep heads the Jindal School of Art and Architecture. He has a rich educational background with two doctorates—in History of Architecture & Urbanism and Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The Frozen Iris team recently invited him to take a session on ‘AI, Design, Creativity and Ownership’.
So, what makes Prof Jaideep so sure that you and I can’t be replaced by Artificial Intelligence??
The answer lies in how he defines the word “intelligence” itself.
According to Prof Jaideep, the AI world misunderstands what “being intelligent” means. To understand his view, we first must take a look at two competing definitions of intelligence:
1. The Cognitivist Idea of Intelligence
According to cognitivists, our intelligence is primarily a bunch of rule-sets and mental models. This view proposes that intelligence is a detached, self-contained “mental infrastructure” or “algorithm” that “processes information” coming to us from the world. In other words, cognitivists like to conceptualise intelligence as a computer program that helps us make sense of the world.
Clearly, the AI world carries over this idea, as is reflected in their modus operandi: “Feed the code enough data, and give it enough rule-sets. Laced with all that processing power, we hope it’ll become “intelligent” somehow”
Even though cognitivism has allowed AI to reach its current zenith, observers like Dr. Hubert Dreyfus, as well as Prof Jaideep, find this model rather limited. This is where the next model of intelligence becomes important.
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2. Bodily Experience as Intelligence
This idea asserts that intelligence is not (just) a detached “algorithm” in our head, but rather the ability of our whole body to: a)? experience the world, b) glean truths from this embodied experience, and c) to refine our sense of flow & unison with these embodied insights as well as the world around us.
Without the body, without its ability to feel, touch, move about and “getting lost” in the world, a detached set of mental models or rule-sets alone cannot be considered “intelligent”.
For example, suppose you’re teaching a kid how to ride their bicycle. There is only so much that you can teach in terms of “rule-sets” and algorithms. Most, if not all, of the “intelligence” required here would be bodily intelligence. “How much pressure to apply on the pedals?”, “which posture to maintain while taking a turn?”,? “how to speed it up or slow it down?”
Not a single one of these – very important – questions can be answered by an “algorithm” which is devoid of bodily kinaesthetic intelligence. In other words, cognitivism fails to account for the innumerous forms of intelligence(s) that depend on a bodily experience.
Now just to be clear, I am not asserting here that robots will never be able to handle a bicycle. In fact, I won’t be surprised if such robots already exist.
However, bodily intelligence (or embodied cognition) is dependent on a human’s ability to “go out there” and experience the world in real time.?
It’s a dynamic, flexible, forever-in-progress form of intelligence that cannot be codified into a static, fixed “algorithm” for a robot’s body or an AI’s code.
To cut a long story short, embodied cognition is a form of intelligence that enables us to “figure out” truths about the world that cannot be expressed in words, logic, rule-sets, 1s and 0s or cold “input” data.
While there’s a lot of stuff that robots can do that we cannot, embodied cognition is squarely our domain. ?
Between cognitivism and embodied cognition, Prof Jaideep subscribes to the second model of intelligence. He cheerfully proclaims that AI – as impressive as it may be – is simply a tool, not an “intelligent” entity by any means. No matter how many rule-sets or data you feed it, there will always be “truths” and “intelligence” beyond AI’s reach because it simply lacks human, embodied cognition.
Knowing this, can programs like GPT and DALL-E be considered replacements for (all of) human “intelligence”? Prof. confidently insists that “no, they cannot!”
So what makes us irreplaceable?
As designers, writers, artists, coders etc., we now find ourselves on a daunting yet exciting precipice. AI can produce a lot, but it cannot “consume” the natural world the way we do. Even then, as time passes, AI will surely amass even larger skill-sets and specialities. The ridiculously impressive and exponential growth of programs like DALL-E and GPT has proven, beyond doubt, that it’s high time we ask ourselves
“which truths can we, and only we, reveal in our capacity as human creators?”
This question is an invitation for us to fundamentally shift our view, reassess our creative paths and set our sights on a more holistic understanding of our relationship with the world.
As we lean into this question, we draw closer and closer to what makes us irreplaceable. It will be unwise to completely ignore that, yes, AI programs do make large swaths of certain skill-sets “obsolete”. And it will be unwise to not adapt to that reality.
But it will be even more unwise to ignore what makes us human, and what makes us “intelligent”: our ability to live, to experience the world and feel its truths. This is what programs like GPT, DALL-E and Bard do not have, but you and I do.
Channelling Prof Jaideep's jubilant confidence in this irreplaceable human spirit, I feel compelled to say: As the world worries about how AI can replace us, let us not lose sight of an even greater question:
What is it about us that AI can't replace?
(Disclaimer: This article was written completely by the AI program ChatGP- we're kidding. But, yes, ChatGPT was used for various inputs here)
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