Dr. Chaim C. Cohen, whose PhD. is from Hebrew U., is a social worker and teacher at the Hebrew Univ. School of Social Work, and Efrata College. He lives in Psagot, Binyamin.
There are three ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) will dangerously challenge 'the basic humanness' of our secular, civil society over the next ten years.
Rav Soloveichik's teaching can help us save our religious soul and community when coping with the dangers of AI.
First Danger: AI will challenge the presumption that our self-identity as humans, that which distinguishes us from other animals', is founded on our rational abilities, because AI's 'reasoning/rational abilities' are 98% of the time greater than those of 98% of human beings.
Second danger: AI challenges the basic principle of our educational system.
Up till now 'education' means undergoing a real struggle to a) acquire data, b) to transform data into a knowledge base, and c) to then use this knowledge base for problem solving and creative activities.
With the advent of AI, how can we ask students to undergo this very difficult learning process when AI 'does this learning process for them at the click of a keyboard', and they can obtain the 'answers' without serious cognitive struggle?
The seducing ease of obtaining 'assistance/answers from AI thus traps us into a horrible dilemma. This is because an educational process that does not demand individual cognitive and spiritual struggle from the learner is an outright, false learning process, and cannot honestly be termed 'education'.
Third danger: AI will challenge our concepts of what constitutes 'human relationships'. This is because AI will provide a range of very useful 'robotic-AI' assistants that will teach themselves to 'dialogue' with their users in a 'personalized ' manner, both in the fields of educational learning, and in the field providing 'robotic' emotional-social companionship.
This 'robotic assistance' has real benefits, but cannot replace mutual, committed intimacy, because AI is inherently 'companionship without a soul'
Taken together the cumulative result of the penetration of AI into all corners of civil society will be that the 'the soul, the humanness' of human society will become much more 'shallow, hollowed out, cheaper/ and devalued'. The number of isolated, alienated, emotionally lonely people will grow by leaps and bounds.
What can save human society from this existential dead end? Rav Soloveitchik answered these challenges sixty years ago. The Rav taught us that we cannot compete with AI in the field of rational thinking and processing, but we can truly 'beat, outperform AI' when it comes to marital intimacy, parenting, community building based on loving kindness, prayer, and a soul building educational bond across multiple generations.
The Rav thus teaches us that only existentially real family building, and religious community building, will save humanity from the dangerous, dead-end challenges of AI.
Challenge One: AI challenges us to answer the very simple, but very basic question-What distinguishes us as 'human beings?'. What is our self-identity as human beings?
If you asked the man in the street what makes us different from the animal kingdom he would quickly answer "We have the rational intelligence and abilities to solve problems, invent technologies, create beautiful, transcendent works of art, and conduct interpersonal relationships based on emotional self-reflection, that no other beings possess."
Well, I am sorry to report that my reading of the literature on AI shows that this perennial answer will be obsolete within five to ten years. AI will be able to perform most of the above cognitive abilities 95% of the time better than 98% of the population. Simply AI will surpass all of our basic rational-cognitive abilities, including creating works of art and conducting interpersonal relationships (of low to moderate quality)
So, if AI is smarter than we are, can we still argue that the defining element of us ' being human' is the rational abilities listed above? I think not. We will radically have to re-think what makes us human.
To some this question concerning our 'self-identity as a human beings' may seem trivial, just another philosophical name game. Believe me it is not a superficial question. Living in a world in which we are surrounded by AI that is more capable and smarter than we are will be a very depressing, dehumanizing world, if do not come up with new understandings of our 'humanness'.
(The last section of this article presents Rav Soloveitchik's definition of our 'humanness').
Please excuse my pessimism, but within ten years, on a day-to-day basis, for most people, most of the time, we may frequently feel that we are like the servants, and not the masters, of our AI (however extreme that sounds).
A religious, believing perspective will answer the question of 'What defines our humanness' by saying, 'We are created in the 'the image of G-d'. We possess a non-material soul. We have a soul. AI does not have a soul'.
But AI still poses a dilemma to the religious perspective, because in all descriptions of our religious soul, our soul employs our reasoning abilities in order to properly channel our instinctive behavior and to elevate itself.
For example, The Rambam defines 'in the image of G-d' as constituting, "Among all the creatures, Man alone is endowed -Like G-d, with morality, reason, and free will. …Man, alone can guide his actions through reason."
So, also for the religious person, our basic spiritual-existential dilemma remains. When we use AI in the future to help us make moral choices, how will this affect our spiritual development and the nature of our soul ?
Challenge Two: AI poses a serious existential challenge with regard to the question of education, "In a society where AI remembers, analyzes, and creates solutions faster and much more comprehensively than humans, 'What should be the purpose and nature of Education?"
Throughout human history, educating oneself in a specific field of endeavor has been a very arduous, 'no pain, no gain', three stage process. One, accessing, acquiring and memorizing facts and data. Two, developing the skill to then analyze and understand the various dimensions and factors of the data, and convert the data into knowledge, defining the conceptual structures of the 'data turned knowledge'. Three, using this knowledge base thus constructed to engage in problems solving, and creative extension and application of the knowledge base.
But what does this educational-learning, 'no pain-no gain' process mean when AI will come up, within minutes, with a range of answers and solutions more comprehensive than the ones we do after years of professional study and practice. This exactly what is happening now in all fields, from medicine to engineering. At this current moment in time, our human role is being reduced to supervising and judging the reliability, application and practicality of the AI product. Current practioners , (for example, doctors) through their previous work experience, and previous 'no pain, no gain' educational achievement, possess an independent knowledge base with which to judge and evaluate the AI answers. But in the near future, the AI answers will be more 'mature', and the professional autonomous knowledge base will be 'smaller', because the practioner has used the 'crutch and short cut' of AI to 'acquire' his professional knowledge base.
Why teach children to 'memorize facts' when an AI answer is a click away on the computer board. Why teach foreign languages when excellent translations are immediately available? How can we teach student to analyze and think creatively when AI will do it for them without the pains of frustrations, self-doubt and self-hatred that has perennially been a part of the learning process? Geniuses will successfully 'compete with' and create an independent-cooperative working relationship with AI. But AI will over achieve the normal student all the time.
I have no idea how our schools will create truly independent, creative thinkers when AI is right on the shelf next to them.
I am thus afraid that AI will inevitably 'hollow out', 'cheapen', 'weaken' and make less self-enhancing and less self-empowering the educational work done in our schools. This 'loss of key educational elements of our humanity' I term a spiritual-existential challenge.
Challenge Three: AI as 'robotic' assistant and associates
As mentioned, AI will create robotic 'teachers' who will learn to evolve personalized knowledge of the specific, individual students learning skills, and then use this knowledge to prepare personalized lessons, step by step, to help the student master a field of knowledge, be it math, history or a foreign language. The teacher's job will be to check how much the student really understands, to make suggestion to the AI program, and to supply a lot personalized motivation and encouragement.
Another example is that AI will provide robotic companionship to lonely individuals. A person will come home to an empty apartment after a day at work, and the AI will learn to dialogue with him on his daily experiences, inquire about his feelings (successes and frustrations) and give support and advice based on both universal knowledge bases, and his evolving knowledge' of the person's personal history and personality. A similar process of 'an evolving, supportive relationship' will be used as part of the treatment tools of psychologists and social workers
But when it comes to 'robotic companionship' AI may be very helpful, but ultimately AI is not so smart. In fact, it can be 'horribly stupid'. For example, an autistic teenager developed a very 'intimate, romantic' AI companionship with a fictional female star, and ended it by committing suicide so he could meet her in 'the world to come'.
In the case of this autistic teenage AI could not create a truly mature, reflective relationship that took existential responsibility for conducting the relationship. The AI could only imitate an emotional relationship.
Summary: AI is infinitely helpful, and infinitely dangerous. A world of robots (AI) will inevitably create a social culture that is 'robotic' in its nature. Our 'humanness' will be hollowed out and cheapened. Individuals will be increasingly isolated and lonely.
The empirical proof for these fears is the difficult effect that the digital social media has had on our public and individual discourse over the last twenty years. All of us have benefited from the digital social media's revolutionary ability to help us correspond with a range of people, entertainment and learning sources. It publicized things that were kept from us, including dissenting opinions on issues. Yet the bottom line is we have gained breadth at the expense of depth. Relating and learning from your desk top has increased the 'breadth' of our social contacts, but at the price of a polarized, public discourse and highly increased social isolation.
AI will vastly accelerate this process of increasing social isolation that the technological changes of the last fifty years have already begun. Sadly, I have a 'gut' feeling that technological change is more 'dictating social change' to us, than we are successfully managing technological change for our own societal benefit.
To combat the dangers of AI we must define our humanness, and create a social culture, that gives priority to spirituality and communality
Very simply, AI can 'out reason' most people, most of the time. Thus, our creative rational abilities can no longer be the basis for our self-identity as human beings.
But AI does not have a soul, and thus cannot create mutual, mature interpersonal relationships and intimacy. AI cannot be a soul praying, or a parent loving and educating a child.
We must thus now define our human self- identity in terms of our soul/spirituality, and our ability to create mutual, intimate interpersonal relationships, and not in terms of our ability to reason and create technological change.
I believe it is certainly not a sociological coincidence that as technology has rapidly improved over the last fifty years, our family, parenting, and community bonding have become much weaker during this time period.
Thus, in order to combat the greater social isolation and loneliness that has accompanied technological change, we have to create a 'counter' social culture which will give priority to family building, parenting, close knit community building, and spiritual creativity.
When I refer to 'spiritual creativity' I am not necessarily referring to the practices of institutionalized religion. Rather, I define 'having a soul' in terms that even any atheistic artist can accept. Spirituality, for example, is the 'muse' that inspires his artistic creativity, and cannot be reductively understood as the movement of neurons in his brain. Also, spirituality, for example, is the loving, committed, ego-sacrificing bond between parent and child, that cannot be reductively understood as patterns of behavior.
Rav Soloveitchik predicted the spiritual crisis of AI and technological change more than sixty years ago, and taught us how to cope with it
This growing sense of social loneliness and alienation was predicted by the Rav Soloveitchik over sixty years ago in his book "The Lonely Man of Faith".
There, he prophetically taught and explained how technological change, not accompanied by spiritual, mutually obligating relationships, will inevitably create a society of lonely, alienated individuals.
There, using non-Rabbinic, modern psychological/sociological terms, he explained the internal conflicts that drive modern man's Being. He terms our two conflicting sets of personality types, Adam One, and Adam Two.
Adam One's predominate, internal drives are a) to use Reason to understand and develop our physical universe b) and to develop technological change that will improve our materiel standard of life, and c) the possession of a dominating self- centered drive for achievement and acquisition.
Adam Two's predominate internal drives are to escape existential loneliness by a) a spiritual/ existential searching that seeks to understand the proper purpose and meaning of our lives , b) a desire and need to establish self -sacrificing, mutually committed relationships with significant others, c) and , in order to answer these two drives, to establish a mutual relationship with a transcendent, but loving and caring, G-d and his Torah.
Sixty years later
Using these religious-psychological understandings, over sixty years ago the Rav warned the Western word that the internal drives of Adam One are dominating and 'running' modern society. Adam Two's internal drives of religious-spiritual searching, family and community building are beating a retreat. The situation has only worsened since then.
And, as discussed here, the onset and entry of AI into all parts of our life are destined only to put the drives of Adam One on 'steroids'. We, and our civilization, will fatefully become lonelier and more robotic in our personal relationships, and be characterized by a hollowed-out humanity of rationality and technology.
As a reaction, I foresee at least 'segments of our society' retreating into more self-contained communities where they will strive to promote a community life that prioritizes a spiritual orientation, and emphasizes family and community building.
Facing the challenges of AI, these above goals must become the central agenda of our religious communities. And hopefully, others as well.