In the weeks following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we all asked ourselves the same question: Is AI going to replace us? After a few months, business school professors, economists, and management consultants seemed to agree on an answer: AI won’t replace humans, but humans using AI will.
Frontier AI companies could hardly have come up with a more business-promoting slogan themselves. Now, thanks to the "Pearl Harbor moment" of ChatGPT, they didn’t have to. The panic at the highest levels of the big tech companies spread to the highest levels of society, research institutions, educational organizations and businesses. Soon everyone was telling each other that everything would be fine if only they started using AI now. As in right now!
Still, questions about the existential risks of AI continue to haunt the big tech companies. And this week, current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind published an open letter warning that loss of control over autonomous AI systems could potentially result in human extinction.
But is AI really on the verge of wiping out humanity? Or does the existential threat come from something — or someone — else?
To Be, Or Not To Be In A Computer Simulation
In his 2013 TEDx Talk, Founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, Nick Bostrom defined existential risk as “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development.” His definition of premature human extinction was "before reaching technological maturity."
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Six years earlier, Bostrom identified death as one of humanity’s three biggest problems (the others were existential risk and that life isn’t usually as good as it could be). His understanding of the problems threatening humanity turned out to resonate with how tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk think and talk about human existence: as something so intangible that it might as well be a computer simulation.
It makes sense that someone who believes that human existence comes down to simple mathematical probability would also believe that the things that threaten this existence must be understood and dealt with using mathematical modelling.
But speaking of probability, it is almost 100% certain that the greatest existential thinkers in the history of philosophy would disagree with Bostrom and Musk that human existence — and the threat against it — can be understood by calculating the risk of extinction. Or, for that matter, by weighing pros and cons of superintelligence.
Kings Of Wishful Thinking
While existential risk was not at the top of most C-suite agendas until Bostrom and others introduced the term in relation to AI, philosophers have been discussing what it means to be — and cease to be — human for centuries.
Yet neither Soeren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) nor others who are considered among history's greatest existential thinkers spent their time speculate about human extinction. Instead of worrying about humans becoming extinct in the future, they worried about humans forgetting what it means to be human now. As in right now.
Existential philosophers don’t think about death as a problem, but as an existential condition that reminds us to spend our time wisely. That said, they were painfully aware that the knowledge that we are going to die comes with an anxiety that can lead to wishful thinking that death can be delayed or avoided altogether. But it is indeed wishful thinking. Not because advanced technology will never be able to extend our lives potentially indefinitely — it’s not for existential philosophers to say — but because such an indefinite life will no longer be a human life.
To Exist, Or To Ex-ist, That Is The Question
Unlike Musk, existential philosophers don’t consider human existence intangible. On the contrary, they would say, it is our tangible — and transitory — bodies that enable us to ex-ist. With this unusual way of writing ex-istence, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wanted to highlight the human ability to understand ourselves as something and someone different from something and someone else.
As humans we not only exist like everything else that lives and breathes on this earth, we also ex-ist in the sense that we ask ourselves who and what we are — and who and what we should be. To ignore this ex-istential feature of human existence is to think of ourselves and each other as simpler creatures than we are.
It might be tempting if you are in the business of creating machines that can imitate human thinking and behavior. But it might also cause you — and the people using your machines — to lose touch with what it means to be human.
The Greatest Threat To Humans Is Humans
Understanding ourselves as something and someone different from something and someone else is what makes us take responsibility for something and someone other than ourselves. As humans, it is never in our self-interest to serve only our self-interest. As the phenomenon of suicide proves, survival is never enough.
As individuals as well as humanity, we need a greater purpose than to avoid extinction. And we need each other to remind us of that. That’s why this article is titled "AI Is Not An Existential Threat, But Humans Using AI Are:" Because the pursuit of technological maturity risks leading to ex-istential immaturity. And not only in the people who develop the technology, but also in those who use it.
The greatest threat to humans is not technology, but humans who have forgotten that there is more to being human than what can be imitated and replaced by technology. Just as it is not for existential philosophers to say whether advanced technology will be able to extend our lives indefinitely, it should not be for math experts and tech founders to tell us how to understand and live our lives. Deciding what is worth living and striving for is a job for each and everyone of us. One that AI can never replace.
The best way to remember that is to stop seeing ourselves and our surroundings through the lens of technology and start seeing it through the eyes, body and ex-istence that comes with being human.
Afterall, there are greater things in life than reaching technological maturity. And forgetting that is a greater threat to humanity than extinction.
