AI and Value
It is now dogma in Silicon Valley that AI will make humanity obsolete. The argument is compelling with AI models now achieving benchmarks thought vastly out of reach just a year ago such as gold medals in the Math Olympiad. There is no doubt that AI is now accomplishing things once reserved for humanity alone. But these achievements have come at staggering costs.
Grok projects that by the year 2030, AI demand for electricity will exceed that of Spain. Tech firms are paying $250 million for AI researchers. And private investment in AI companies is well north of $650 Billion dollars and accelerating.
From this perspective, the AI revolution is finally placing a numerical value on humanity’s intelligence, and it is astronomical. Your brain and connecting nervous system are worth at least a trillion dollars given the immense sums being poured into replicating them this decade. But when is the last time that you treated yourself, or others around you, like a trillion-dollar asset?
The fundamental issue is we have treated our intelligence as an assumption, a part of our human birthright. Therefore, it does not make each and every one of us special; It just makes us the same. This is a grave error, and one that stems back to the very question of God’s existence.
If you adhere to the view that intelligence is purely due to cold probability and evolutionary forces, the birthright view of intelligence flows naturally. Being intelligent by itself makes us human- as Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am.” It is inherent in human value. The threat of artificial intelligence to humanity is also much more acute in this perspective as I explored in my piece, AI: Artificial Intelligence and Adam 1. If we are no longer the only being with intelligence, what separates us from our creation?
However, in a world created by a higher power, intelligence is something granted to humanity. A gift. Intelligence can be separated from humanity and valued on its own. We need not be threatened by the emergence of another intelligent being for it will lack the defining element of what makes us human- in the Christian tradition, the eternal soul.
These two views cannot be resolved. In fact, I see them as a fundamental divide from which to view humanity. Therefore, the most underrated question in this humanity vs AI debate is:
“Do you think intelligence is more likely to come from a natural universal process, the random combination of protons, electrons and neutrons interacting, or by the design of a higher power?”
The immensity of the resources we have directed towards the race to intelligence reveals the unlikelihood that the advent of intelligence is a random event, some outcome of the laws of probability. It reminds of the story Nassim Taleb tells about the probability of a coin flip. If a coin lands heads 99 times in a row, it is much likelier that the coin is rigged than the next toss to have a 50/50 chance of being tails.
Therefore, I find the other path, a higher power, to be a more humble and likely source of intelligence. With this view in mind, we return to the central question: what does AI teach us about the value of intelligence? And beyond that, the value of humanity?
It should teach us that we significantly undervalue our own worth. We each have been blessed with an incredible gift, something worth over a trillion dollars in the modern economy. At the same time, intelligence is just a part of the human experience, not the whole, and therefore that trillion-dollar valuation falls well short of what each and every one of us is truly worth. For if our intelligence is worth trillions, then our eternal soul is priceless. And wouldn’t it be poetic if AI reveals that instead of being replaceable, our humanity is valuable beyond measure.