Let hope and despair grapple: Sentiments from the frontier of technological progress

 For us humans, it seems to be the best of times, and the worst of times.  

It is indeed the age of having information at our fingertips, but also to let misinformation rule our sentiments. 

It is a time when technology can talk back to us in a human-like manner, and yet many people struggle to read, understand and write properly. 

It is a time when the OpenAI’s o1 can do complex reasoning, and yet most of our readers would find this Dickensian rendering of human plight incomprehensible. 

Our newspapers would claim that we are all going downhill, and yet we are now at the threshold of delaying ageing and death, seeding rain and synthetic fuel, space travel for leisure and being present everywhere at the same time through holograms. 

In short, we are having a normal day, complaining that things could be better and forgetting that we have come a long way.  

Of course, as Paul Virilio says: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” 

Therefore, as we arrive at a technological tipping point, when AI may challenge human species to be the most intelligent beings on the planet, we are afraid of what dystopia this would bring. But, the answer is not in limiting what AI can do, but what us humans are able to create. 

The I in AI is intelligence defined by the human species, and if our conspecifics keep that privilege, we should view all AI achievements positively. This sense of intelligence has emerged through millennia of evolutionary adjustment with the natural world and our recent tool-making did not pose a challenge to this hard-earned privilege – AI has only augmented our ability to do things which we desired to do. 

This hopeful tale hangs on one assumption: That our inventions reflect our collective desire for progress and not the dreams of world domination of some misanthrope.  This is a critical assumption, because, right now, this demands technological progress must be accompanied by such progress in collective participation in shaping it. This should be the sole objective of 21st century Higher Education – a Promethean goal of endowing the humanity with the power to shape the technology. 

This is a shift from what our education institutions aim for. From making better workers, a nineteenth-century goal, we need to shift to making those creators, inventors and participants who would define the choices and shape our journeys. They would need all the nineteenth-century virtues of consistency and commitment but also the new ones, such as creativity, conscience and compassion. 

As HG Wells said, civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe. This rings true more than ever!