Artificial Intelligence and Mindful Joy
What AI can teach us about our humanity and the danger of mindless tools
Artificial Intelligence is a tool. It can be misused by stupid or irresponsible people. It can abused by the wicked. But the tool itself is not the problem. AI can be useful, if wisely employed and responsibly regulated.
AI also prompts us to think about our humanity. It reminds us that human beings are not simply logical machines. We are creative, caring, social creatures. We are most fully human when we play, laugh, sing and dance, and when we share joy and sorrow in a world inhabited by other people.
AI does not inhabit a social world. It does not play, enjoy, hate, or love. It cannot dance or mourn. This means that AI cannot be wicked or malicious. AI couldn’t care less about us because AI cannot care about anything at all.
AI and the A-Bomb
The companies that make AI are now warning about super-powerful AI systems that could disrupt everything. One new system has been given the ominous, super-villain name "Claude Mythos.” The hype about spooky AI could be a marketing ploy. Headlines about AI systems that are “too dangerous to release to the public” certainly attract attention.
We non-experts have no way of knowing whether an AI system such as Claude Mythos is a doomsday machine. We hope the engineers and corporate bigwigs know what they are doing and that they are as concerned about ethics and safety. But corporations are interested in profit, and engineers want to build cool stuff. Regulation requires a social division of labor. At some point, the law must regulate AI, as it is now beginning to do with social media.
We might be reassured by the fact that AI companies are ringing the alarm bell about powerful AI. But this is like Robert Oppenheimer saying “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” after helping to invent the atomic bomb. The best time to avoid the apocalypse is before you invent a doomsday machine.
The A-bomb analogy is edifying. Like nuclear physics, AI can be used either for good or evil—to create or to destroy. Ethical restraint and wise regulation are crucial.
With AI there is also the uncanny fear that these machines could become malicious agents. It is doubtful, however, that AI could be malicious. Attitudes like malice are entirely human. It is human beings who employ tools for wicked purposes. It was human beings who chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if AI goes rogue, it is humans who will be to blame.
The fault is in the tinkerer, not the tool. Or as some people glibly say, “Guns don’t kill people; people do.” This is obviously true. It does not mean, however, that we should not regulate guns. We should regulate guns, atomic bombs, and powerful AI because malicious people can use them wickedly and foolish people can use them irresponsibly.
Logical Machines are Heedless
AI cannot be malicious or wicked because it lacks passion, interest, and care. It does not love. It does not hate. These are uniquely human capacities.
Aristotle defined human beings as rational political animals. Our rationality distinguishes us from other animals. Unlike other social animals—bees, whales, or wolves—we ask questions about justice, ethics, and virtue that demand logical responses.
Today we must reconsider our humanity in contrast with logical machines that provide quick and accurate answers to our questions. We are discovering that we are not unique in our ability to manipulate language and produce coherent responses to verbal inputs. In this sense, AI has passed the Turing Test: it is not distinguishable from a human being in its ability to produce logical responses.
If you ask an AI system a question such as “What is justice?” it will produce a logical answer immediately. But what is lacking in the answer is the attitude of caring about justice or taking heed of the existential import of the question.
I’m teaching a political philosophy class this semester. We have been discussing the question of justice for several months. An AI chatbot can quickly produce complex paragraphs full of relevant information about this topic. It’s a bit discouraging. I’ve spent 40 years studying political philosophy. AI can instantly reproduce the content of my lifetime of study.
AI is also a good conversationalist. When I type specific questions about justice into the chatbot, it responds with useful information. It even follows with relevant questions that carry the discussion along. This cordial conversational style is why some people are seduced into thinking of AI as a friend, a counselor, or a trusted advisor.
But AI is not a friend. It is not a human being who cares about the information it processes or the people it interacts with. Unlike real human friends—who love us, laugh with us, and mourn with us—AI is empty of social and emotional life. AI is logical and “rational” in a limited sense of the term. But it is still only a mindless, heedless machine.
Taking Heed of our Humanity
To “take heed” means to pay attention, to care, or to concern yourself with something. When we are heedful, we are mindful. To be mindful is to attend to the object of thought. We use the term “mind” to speak of “caring for” or “tending to” something—as in the phrase “mind your manners.”
As far as we know, AI cannot take heed. It does not mind things. It cannot care.
AI’s information processing is soulless. It does not care about the conversation or the information it conveys. Nor does it take heed of the soulful human beings it interacts with.
Aristotle might admit that AI is a rational or logical being. But he would insist that it is not a social animal. Social animals care for each other and for themselves. They mind things and take heed. AI can explain different theories of justice, but it does not get angry about injustice. It cannot experience the joy of liberation or the sadness of degradation. Nor is AI inspired to take action to change the world.
Human beings are social and emotional beings. We get angry or sad. We feel proud or ashamed. We are inspired or afraid. These emotions fill our private spiritual lives. We also feel them in relation to others. I can feel proud of myself or ashamed. I can feel this way about you, and others who inhabit my social world.
AI does not inhabit a social world. Nor does it feel anything at all. This social and emotional emptiness may seem to make AI dangerous, since it cannot take heed of our humanity. Heedless AI does not experience empathy, fear, pride, or worry.
In its cold indifference, it lacks the social and emotional safeguards that guide human intelligence. This is a feature of the tool similar to the frigid apathy of an atomic bomb. But a tool’s social and emotional emptiness is not necessarily dangerous. The real danger arises when human beings employ these tools irresponsibly or maliciously.
The Emptiness of Joyless Words
Lest we think that malice all that matters, let’s conclude by noting how AI reminds us of the joy of being human. We human beings dance and sing, create and wonder. The best moments of human existence occur when we are playing and creating, as embodied emotional beings engaged with others who inhabit a shared human world.
We laugh and jump for joy. We also mourn and moan and wallow in despair. None of this can be done by a soulless machine.
America’s great joyful poet Walt Whitman left a stirring record of spirit-filled humanity. In his “Poem of Joys,” Whitman regales us with the myriad ways that we find joy. This “jubilant poem,” celebrates the joys of engineers and horsemen, motherhood and sex, suffering and battle. He extols the joys of fishing, farming, mining, and sailing.
Whitman even celebrates the joy of old age, serenading the largeness, calmness, and majesty of white-bearded grandfathers who bloom late in life. Of the beautiful “voyage of death,” he sings of the purification of the “voided body” returning to “the eternal uses of the earth.”
Whitman concludes his joyous poem as follows:
O to have my life henceforth a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on,
To be a sailor of the world, bound for all ports,
A ship itself (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air),
A swift and swelling ship, full of rich words—full of joys.
I asked an AI chatbot about these lines. It accurately identified this as Whitman’s work. The AI explained, “It invites readers to embrace a poetic, ecstatic existence, leaving routine behind to celebrate life’s untamed vitality.”
The AI correctly explained the poem, using evocative language. But the machine cannot do what the poet suggests. It cannot embrace a poetic existence. It has no “vitality.” The logical machine is an empty ship. It bandies about these rich and joyful words. But the machine is a mere shell, devoid of spirit, heedless and joyless.
AI is a powerful and impressive tool. We should regulate its use. But in contemplating the power of the machine we also note its poverty. Mindless information processing cannot do what we can do: take heed of existence, inhabit a social world, care for others, and experience the great joy of being human.