There’s a sci-fi series called Black Mirror, and I think the name is spot on. I want to borrow that perfect title to talk about the effect artificial intelligence has on people, and about how technology, especially once we start asking what’s inside it and how much of the human is in the machine, is exactly that: a black mirror. Something you can’t look into, something inscrutable, and yet it reflects your image back at you. Or better, it reflects what you think of yourself, of the human being, of our properties, our traits, of what supposedly makes us special.
Everyone wants to judge, nobody wants to understand
The single most interesting thing to me is that very few people actually want to understand what’s inside, but everyone is eager to declare whether or not it’s intelligent. Nobody is interested in definitions of intelligence that have to do with information or with physics. No: intelligence is something I feel, something I know because I’ve had it since I was born, and therefore I’m qualified to judge whether a machine has it or not.
This staring into a black mirror leads us to project psychological traits onto a machine that may well be doing something completely different. And even while denying intelligence to these objects, in many cases even renowned philosophers do it. I’ve been watching a lot of interviews with Floridi, who is super charismatic, but in my view he dropped the ball spectacularly when he flatly says, “Ah, no, no, what intelligence? What are you even talking about? What is intelligence, anyway?” Who actually wants to get into the substance of what intelligence is? Nobody. Yet everyone insists on circling that concept, and it always comes back to the same question: how much of us is in the machine?
The question that takes real guts
There’s another question, one that takes far more stomach, and you’ll hear it far less often, because to ask it you have to be pretty far gone. And I’ve been pretty far gone for 20 years now.
The other question is: how much of the machine is inside us? Instead of trying to figure out how human the machine is, it would be interesting to figure out how much we ourselves are machines, how mechanical we are. I’ll just leave that there.
