simsa03These questions prove more urgent today with the advent of #AI. Not in the banal sense that AI takes away "our" jobs and with that our prospects of earning a decent living. Far more, in the sense that AI systems will make the last resorts where humans are still deemed necessary, even essential – and that lie at the core of our self-image, e.g., artistry, research, innovation, creativity – irrelevant of human participation.
If even in these areas humans are no longer necessary, then what's the point of being human? We may indulge in disciplines and topics all we want, may still learn crafts, still innovate, but why should that count as valuable? (And specifically not just in the sense of being marketable.)
If (and when) it becomes pointless whether human beings do research, innovate, "create", what are we supposed to do then? With our time, with our lifes? What does it mean to be a human being when it's simply irrelevant whether we are rational or not, creative or not, curious or not?
The advent of AI is not a profound technological change, it is the coming to an end of a civilisation and the beginning of something completely different. And no, I don't ring alarm bells because of some alleged reign of the machines. That reign may happen or not, to that degree or that.
The advent of AI is not on a par with the invention of tools like tanks first introduced in the battlefields of Verdun, or ship containers first standardized by the U.S. Army for their needs to transport material to the theatres of Vietnam, or the nuclear bomb, or the PC, or the internet...
This is a civilisational change as profound as St. Augustine's invention of the inner self in the 4th century.
When we no longer know what and who we are, as the last characteristic traits that purportedly make us human are stripped of their essentiality, then what remains? And what comes next?
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