This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Sherry Horowitz
Sometimes a great gift is unbearable.
Artificial Intelligence is such a gift.
My holocaust survivor grandparents also left me such a gift.
It’s called Judaism.
A meaningful, if ancient, narrative with a deep and abiding wisdom that demands accountability.
I’ve spent my life trying to understand why and how my grandparents remained committed to orthodox Judaism despite unimaginable torture, persecution and antisemitism.
This sort of thinking is best framed in much the same way we design algorithms.
The arc of a man’s life is rooted in premises. They fashion the stories he first tells himself and then, what he tells others…
And AI, with those deep neural networks, with their logical if/then, regressive iteration are modeled after the human mind after all.
On a particularly bitter Canadian winter day, I buried my gloveless hand into my grandfather’s warm pocket. We were walking home from synagogue and the memory of how he, without shoes or food, survived the Dachau Death March was triggered.
He tightened the grip of my 9-year-old small fingers in his paw-like calloused hand. The same hand that had the blue numbers A6295 tattooed on the forearm.
“I want you to tell you something. It’s important you remember. And when you grow up, I want you to tell your children this story.”
Now, as a mother, I’ve had to explain to my children why Judaism is a worthy missive despite the heavy burden of commitment and the price of often being hated.
Why, despite the long history of persecution we Jews have endured, and why we continue to endure.
It’s what drove me to write and study poetry:
The attempt to capture, apprehend, to distill unwieldy ideas.
A poetry of witness to trace the rhetorical and emotional picture of a shared human condition.
As a Jew, I have seen how science, lacking human charity or wisdom could unleash uncalibrated logic that can be terrifying.
If you don’t yet know, it was the scientific narrative of Eugenics that spurred and influenced the justification of genocide of Jews and other ethnic groups.
We can laugh now about the fact that we once thought the world was flat, but when it comes to algorithmic design that drives human relationships it is high stakes for where we might be headed as a race.
What can start out as promising science can have horrifying effects and turn normal human beings into monsters.
We trust science, because it has taught us to be rigorous about our assumptions. It has taught us that instinct is fallible, and, that empirical evidence through our senses can be wrong. But logic and data can be flawed as well.
How one man (Hitler) can use science to create a narrative of destruction that inspires and brainwashes a mass of people into committing genocide.
In artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have created a digitized catalogue of human interests, a hive-like human mind that is being designed to become autonomous and mimic humanity in in a sentient-like manner.
We assuage our concerns of the potential to be hurt by AI by saying that AI will always need human interaction and guidance.
That, it is a tool that with human direction and wisdom (and this is what drives Elon Musk’s pitch to merge with AI) can be a productive force for human advancement.
So, we argue, AI is rooted in the collection of data, scientific discovery and human opinion in order to better our existence.
But here’s where it gets strange:
In trying to simulate the human mind, we have created something in the image of ourselves, but with monstrous capabilities and super-human speed.
If there is a symbiotic relationship that fuels the advancement of machine learning, one must ask who is teaching whom? Aren’t we just teaching our aggregate selves?
It reminds one of the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel and the human desire to conquer its own vulnerability.
But what the builders of Babel were perturbed by is precisely what makes us uniquely human.
If AI is a massive reflection of ourselves and our accumulated knowledge, what are we hoping to learn? Or better, what are we hoping to teach?
That we continue to be fascinated by our human suffering, our sentience, the meaningfulness of our existence, is testament to our most human creative faculties.
If AI is our student, and our student is ourselves, then it is certainly potential for disruption of how we’ve interpreted our understanding of our living purpose.
Like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Information certainly qualifies as an extreme human event.
Our human innovation is, and always has been, driven by a narrative of transformation.
The philosopher James Allen famously quipped:
“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”
The questions we will ask and where they lead us are a gift.
And where and when logic falls apart, there we are, and will be, men.
Teaching AI is De Facto Teaching Ourselves was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Sherry Horowitz
Sherry Horowitz | Sciencx (2022-06-30T11:24:16+00:00) Teaching AI is De Facto Teaching Ourselves. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/06/30/teaching-ai-is-de-facto-teaching-ourselves/
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