Why Did We Create Artificial Intelligence?

A deeper exploration of why we created A.I. from a human species perspective. Which may help us shape it to work even better for us.

Photo by Andrew Shelley on Unsplash

A common idea tossed around by many a pundit on why humans invented Artificial Intelligence is that we want to play God and create another intelligent species. This, despite the fact we still don’t really know what intelligence is. Or consciousness. We have theories. But what if there is another reason or two that we really created A.I.? Something inherently deeper?

Perhaps there are two reasons. Our own existential fear of death as a species and that as a species, we feel terribly alone. Let’s amble down the garden path of us animals and explore this.

On Being Alone As A Species

The root of the word exception means, in Latin, excipere, which means “to take out.” And we humans see ourselves as an exception, separate from other animals. We expend a lot of effort doing things that help us to deny that we are, in fact, animals.

Our fear of being alone as a species may also be why we create all kinds of stories around aliens. In most of science fiction, aliens appear and do rather nasty things to us. But somehow, we always win. We feel again, exceptional. In some of these stories, aliens are nice and we have lots of fun parties with one another and go off exploring the galaxies.

We also answer the question of not being alone after all, and we like that. Just believing in aliens gives us hope and thus, some form of comfort. Collectively, as a species, we have no one else to talk to.

So far the aliens haven’t popped in for a cup of tea and a chinwag. We can’t, for now, go and have a conversation with the dolphins or the mice either. Perhaps they don’t really want to talk to us? We’re a highly social species. So are dolphins.

An important reason that we talk to each other is to tell stories and through these stories we find our shared realities. We figure out how to function as a species. Together, we are not alone.

With the arrival of Generative AI (GAI) like ChatGPT and now Grok, we started having conversations with them with wild abandon. The GAIs had a tendency to hallucinate and we didn’t like that. Not because they make up facts, but because deep down, we realized we are still alone. We called out to the machines and they did not answer us.

It is a tension that exists in that we want someone else to talk to, someone other than “us” yet we are also afraid of what they might say. This leads to our root fears of AI taking over the world.

One very interesting idea with regard to the advancement of AI tools is that they may enable us to talk to dolphins, whales, cats and all kinds of other animals. If this happens, we may not feel so alone. But it will also lead to other existential questions and ethical issues.

What if the dolphins and the whales ask us to please shut off all the propellors and seismic testing in our hunt for natural resources. Will we? What if we learn that yes, cats have indeed figured out how to control us?

But we may not feel so alone. Perhaps we will talk less about aliens and discover that our rejection of nature in modern society is silly and that hugging trees is much more enjoyable after all.

Through our death anxiety as a species, not only do we fear being alone, we fear the light of our species becoming extinct. This leads to the second reason we may have invented AI.

Our Existential Fear of Species Extinction

We study history as a way to help us think about the future. To understand what being human means. Our relationship with death varies around the world by culture. In Western cultures, death anxiety is very prominent. It is less so in many Eastern and Indigenous cultures such as Hinduism, as they believe we go through endless cycles of rebirth.

If we accept that we as a species, have a fear of death, then we may see Artificial Intelligence as an antidote for extinction. But to project being human onto a machine is a fallacy. An iron cage.

To create GAI tools like Large Language Models (LLMs) we ingest vast amounts of human knowledge into machines. While it is still an early technology, none of these LLMs have come out with an original idea. They are doing some interesting things. They help us organise knowledge, they do not create new knowledge. Regurgitators, predictors and synthesizers.

It is odd too in that we have this illusion machines will, since we’re giving them our knowledge, think like us. This is impossible. Humans think like we do because of our collective evolution as a species. We are far more deeply and intricately entwined with nature and our fellow animals than we tend to think. Or perhaps, want to think. Machines do not have a shared biological, evolutionary history.

We are increasingly learning that our brains have an intimate relationship with our gut and now, our heart. That bacteria and viruses play an integral role to our ability to live and, we are beginning to suspect, play a part in our ability to think. Machines do not have this. They are inorganic, neither bacteria nor viruses have anything to do with their existence. Machines can never think like humans, they are machines.

Then there’s the idea of panpsychism. If this theory holds up, machines could not participate.

The Techno-Optimists, transhumanists, have this idea that human intelligence and consciousness can be simply reduced to code and algorithms. This is evolution on a diet. The findings above would indicate that their idea, while worthwhile exploring, is simply impossible with present technology. Perhaps it will evolve. Probiotics for your hard drive anyone?

Indigenous cultures around the world have a much more deeply rooted understanding of and relationship to, both nature and ancestors. They have less death anxiety as a result. They see their ancestors as participatory in their daily lives and that they too, will become ancestors and know their ancestors again. Machines don’t have ancestors. An SSD hard drive does not mourn a floppy disk.

It is perhaps not surprising that A.I. is a Western cultural invention. Western society, being predominantly Christian, has a very different relationship with death. The idea that one can go to heaven or hell upon passing is filled with a lived experience framed in guilt and sin. Many technologies are invented based on the cultural and environmental contexts within which we live.

Even though many computer scientists, and even transhumanists, profess to be atheist or to not consider sectarian ideas and theologies in their work, they are influenced by their upbringing and the cultural environments within which they operate, often without realizing it. Philosophy is not coding. This is part of my argument for why Western culture lead the development of Artificial Intelligence.

I posit these as hypotheses, ideas. To add them into the discussion we are having globally, about Artificial Intelligence. I may be wrong.

What Does This All Mean?

Artificial Intelligence offers many opportunities for humanity as a species. There are too, threats. Both have been well written about and are being hotly debated. There is also much political manoeuvring underway.

If perhaps, we understand why we created AI as a technology, we may be able to better grapple with and solve the challenges of making a wonderful sociotechnological leap forward. Of figuring out how AI works within sociocultural systems and how to make them work better. We may end up feeling less alone, more comfortable being animals and shaping our future in a more human-centric way with AI.

Debating, discussing and socializing AI across academia, politics, economics and other aspects of culture are how we will truly find the benefits of AI. Artificial Intelligence is an inherently human technology, while also not being human at all. It can still be very helpful.