Going further in this month’s topic of “AI”, I would like to explore the AI x Humans discussion.
According to Gil Weinberg, this subject has been debated for more than 170 years. In 1843, Lady Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician considered to be the world’s first programmer, said:
“A machine cannot have human-like intelligence as long as it only does what humans have programmed it to do. A machine must be able to create original ideas to be considered intelligent.”
Well, Lady Ada, the time has come, but…
As much as we can create complex programs and algorithms, in a nutshell, AI limits itself to proposing possibilities, calculating probabilities, and coming up with a verdict from its analysis.
It still can’t distinguish the beautiful from the ordinary or a good idea from a bad one on its own -which so far appears that only we humans are capable of doing.
We have been able to create machines capable of proposing products and ideas that are close to the concept of creativity, but these processes and results at some point must be analyzed by a person, guiding the machine along the most creative path. According to several scholars, creativity is a value judgment -one that AI does not yet can make.
Is that so?
Here is the catch: if we insist on seeing creativity as an individual attribute, skill, and/or competence, this discussion between AI x Humans will continue to escalate.
But there is an alternative emerging on the horizon. As I explained in my book, we are entering a new generation of creativity research. Sociocultural views of creativity allow us to understand creation (both AI and humans) through a systemic view.
Instead of being something glued to the human side, this new approach to creativity proposes an interesting twist: Individuals are not creative, ideas are creative, and therefore function as conceptual throughlines that are embodied in a succession of artifacts that evolve over time.
Therefore, the creative capacity of AI continues somehow to be linked to its owner, creator, operator, and/or programmer. In this perspective, AI is an important tool that gives us the ease of not having to master all the skills needed to create something but still depends on our human evaluation to be creative.
AI plays the role of a material artifact with which we interact over time to create. In other words, both humans and AI are producers and products of an ever-changing context-embedded environment, at the same time.
Basically, we will interact with AI in the near future pretty much like we interact with (and depend on) our smartphones today. Ai will give us autonomy but, like any other technology, it will come with a dependency cost. In Edgar Morin’s words:
“For a living being to be autonomous, it is necessary that it depends on its environment on matter and energy, and also in knowledge and information. The more autonomy will develop, the more multiple dependencies will develop. The more my computer will allow me to have an autonomous thought, the more it will depend on electricity, networks, sociological and material constraints. One arrives then to a new complexity to conceive living organization: the autonomy cannot be conceived without its ecology. Moreover, it is necessary for us to see a self-generating and self-producing process, that is to say, the idea of a recursive loop which obliges us to break our classical ideas of product > producer, and of cause > effect.”
In other words, in creative ecosystems, people learn how to navigate their environment, so it allows them to be autonomous, in a cycle of autonomy-dependence.
It doesn’t need to be a bad thing, though. In fiction movies like She (2014), humans are constantly interacting with a kind of smartphone to carry out most of our daily tasks and activities.
Another good representation of this symbiosis is the short film Sight, by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo (not so much like the end, I hope!).
Have you ever thought about how much you interact with technology daily?
How do you think your daily interactions will change when AI becomes part of your day-to-day routines?