Britt Östlund: The soul is forgotten in the visions of AI engineers

Will we have any use for artificial intelligence (AI) to solve the problems of today’s society? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before AI is linked to mental illness and the decriminalization of young people who have slipped. Could AI be a shortcut to a happier life instead of the usual path of cbt and other support efforts? Could an implant help vulnerable youth make less violent and destructive choices?

Artificial intelligence is making its way, and this opportunity is probably not far off. We are experiencing how AI is slowly but surely automating our daily lives as the personal assistant in the mobile phone, Siri, gets smarter and quicker conclusions from large amounts of data become decision support for us as bank customers and patients , to name two examples.

But how far are we prepared to face the new technological possibilities? Here we are talking about a technology that goes beyond the management of buttons and interfaces and which is already on its way to transforming what we perceive as the most profoundly human. Karl-Ove Knausgård talks about meat engineers who mechanically exploited our bodies but left our souls (DN 25/9). Undoubtedly, engineering has taken over the advances in medicine. But if we take a closer look, we see that now social engineering or even flesh engineers are no longer crowding the door, soul or spirituality engineers have already passed through there on their way to the future.

Having an implant operated on to treat severe depression or to relieve the tremors of Parkinson’s disease is no longer an illusion today. And what else can be exploited from the human body no longer concerns only biology, but also another dimension: the soul. The use of technology to compensate for physical losses and improve health is quite incontrovertible today. Hip replacements and cataract surgeries are more the rule than the exception among the elderly, not to mention hearing aids or eyeglasses. Diabetics and people who need implants to control heart rhythms and prevent heart attacks are other examples.

Around the corner, ‘exoskeletons’ wait to be better adapted to support weakened arms and legs or perhaps become full body suits, in a development that is now underway under the EU’s research programme. The exoskeleton is therefore a kind of support rail made of different materials which, like the shell of the beetle, can help us, for example in the case of weak leg muscles when climbing stairs.

How that technology gives us these opportunities to avoid pain and to be able to replace worn out body parts, we also become friendlier towards new technological advances. We accept and normalize more and more interventions that were unthinkable ten years ago. This research has long been motivated by the increase in needs following a higher average life expectancy. It is not uncommon for large medical research projects to be granted as he is convinced that this is what population development requires, and clearly physical health and quality of life have improved for many of us. But are we asking the right questions? With AI venturing into areas involving the soul and the need for meaning, it becomes hard to avoid questions about whether even longer lives and functioning bodies are what we should strive for.

In one of my research projects there was a lady approaching her centennial. She, who was otherwise perfectly healthy, had suffered from a serious illness and had been offered an operation. This could at best prolong her life by a few years. For her, it wasn’t primarily the question of living longer that mattered most, but whether that was what she really wanted. And above all: who could he talk to about it? In the extension, of course, there is also a real possibility of swapping body parts for more attractive ones. Not because ours are worn out, but because we want more beautiful body parts. There is already a growing market here. In the summer of 2018, an exhibition was held at the Cooper-Hewitt design museum in New York that can be compared to a fashion show for exoskeletons and hand and forearm replacements. Therefore, it is not so difficult to imagine that the interest in exchanging the hand shells for more beautiful and more powerful variants is already culturally prepared. But how prepared are we for AI to invade our deepest layers?

Kurzweil believes that spiritual experiences alongside sexual ones are the means by which we can move beyond the body and the brain

We are already well on our way to becoming cyborgs, both human and mechanical. One of the leading artificial intelligence researchers of our time, Ray Kurzweil, claims that if we continue in the direction of the tangent, we should be software by the end of this century, but not least much happier with the help of AI. Here we are not talking about human-like mechanical robots, but about spirit machines (“spirit machines”). Kurzweil believes that spiritual experiences, along with sexual ones, are the means by which we can go beyond the body and brain and transcend the limits set by our daily physical life and our mortality. So why not delve into them? When he says that “We are not people trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human”, certainly speaks of the nascent interest in spirituality also in our country, where the fear of touching spirituality is quite widespread. But the path that opens up here presupposes both an informed discussion of the soul and a critical discussion of technology.

Kurzweil believes the creation of this new human being will increase the power and depth of our spiritual capacity. He explains that machines carrying human memories and experiences will perceive themselves as conscious and will be convinced that these experiences are meaningful.

When our intelligence and mind merge with that of the machine, there is nothing to stop AI from also contributing to the deepening of spiritual experiences. The crux of unleashing AI research ambitions to develop spirit machines is now not primarily a technical or medical issue. It’s about what makes us unique and precious, what makes us human. It’s also about who’s going to deal with the problem.

But nobody seems to catch the ball. Neither physicists who are driven to explore unknown dimensions nor theologians who are interested in the meaning of life do so. Physicists who, with new tools in the last century, have been able to look more and more inside the body, have had to be content with the soul. It could not be seen, and since then the question has been considered outside their field of research. But does it hold up today, when the distance between the deepest human and machines is shrinking more and more? Nor do theologians grasp the question of how the soul and the spiritual relate to technology, in this case artificial intelligence. He dismisses himself simply by saying that technology and man are profoundly incompatible and that interconnection risks making us less human. In that context, artificial intelligence is another step towards desacralization.

Way of reasoning can be found in philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus and sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman. They describe the problem of contemporary man to maintain contact with the deepest human being, with the sacred in a secularized culture. Both Dreyfus and Bauman describe it as feelings of loss, a lack, a gut feeling, a sadness that sometimes leads to the “floating fear” Bauman speaks of as the uncertainty of not really landing deep inside.

What use, then, of these thinkers when we are faced with the powerful and well-funded AI research that wants to make us happy cyborgs? As long as we divide the world into (non-human) objects and (human) subjects and consider them incompatible, we are fine. Since we are already used to such a division of the world into humans and technology as separate, a conscious strategy is needed to see the whole in which both technology and we humans are included. All of this thinking is confirmed by technology sociologist Bruno Latour, who believes that understanding of how things are connected would increase if we were more interested in how social worlds are constructed and integrated with technology. This theory may prove useful when we, with spirit machines, leave the body and implants. Perhaps we discover that body and soul are false dichotomies that block us in our attempts to understand man. Instead of asking us from we have a soul we could act as if we I had one soul.

In good company with Dreyfus, we could point to the spiritual and the sacred that is there, even in AI research, and learn to see it. He does not behave like a mechanized cyborg, but like a human being with a conscious sensitivity to what is sacred and creates meaning in our world. It is perhaps our strongest defense against becoming less human and divided and instead creating human decision support for what choices we should make, how AI should be used. If we deny that we have a soul, we leave the whole matter to an unlimited and continuous automation of the deepest strata of man. Do we want it?

Britt Östlund is professor of medical technology and health systems at KTH

Read more

Lisbeth Sachs: A new era pushes us to re-evaluate the concept of death