Artificial Intelligence and Humanity II

Technological advance

Nowadays chatterbots perform much better on the Turing test than they used to. Maybe not because they are getting better at imitating human chats; but because this skill has deteriorated in humans due to its restricted use. The ability to chat trough a computer can be replaced, partly, by intelligent computer programs.

Current text editors include the following functionalities: predictive algorithms that recommend the following word to be written. Spell check validation showing several alternatives to replace the misspelled word by the option chosen by the user. Automatic syntax validation, alerting the user by underlying the wrong sentence and pointing to the defective segment; it also allows the computer to correct the sentence by itself when desired by the user. Automatically replace words that are constantly repeated by a suggested synonym. These tools tend to make us dependent of the program utilities to be able to chat correctly.

Humans no longer need to have several skills because they can be performed by computers, many of these tasks can be done faster and with a higher degree of accuracy. These skills include the abilities to execute math calculations, translating a text from one language to another, the organization of large amounts of data, finding the quickest or shortest path to go from one place to another, etc. This allows us to develop other abilities which tend to be less repetitive and more creative.

Differences between humans and computers

Dorian Cole compares the "I am" statement pronounced by a human to the traditional first words of a computer program: "Hello World." A computer presents an output to human beings through an interface so that people know that it is working. The computer responds to external programs. One could hang a sign on a window saying, "Hello World," and we would see it as an imitation of the task performed by the computer program. But interpreting a sign that says, "I am," would be a difficult task.

Computers are able to change their main processing structure. They are also able to modify by themselves their software structure, which is the part that indicates what procedures they should follow. Since their creation they have been meliorating in an exponential way which makes them immensely more powerful than when they appeared. Human brains aren’t able to self-improve neither to modify themselves in such a radical way machines can. We can progress only in small increments. We can improve ourselves by learning, practice, hone our skills and acquire knowledge. Also new discoveries can increase our ability to make further discoveries. Anyway our brains today are much the same as they were ten thousand years ago.

Myths

The myth of the scientific method as the only approach to reality will become completely obsolete without loss to man's interaction with this world. The path to understanding has to be prepared by a lineal but also mysterious approach of hunches and intuitions in addition to direct perceptions and sensations.

The right hemisphere was presumed to be more “primitive” than the left because the latest deals with language, math, perform tasks in a logical and sequential order and is more specialized than the other. The right brain was also wrongly labeled as "primitive" because left brain abilities where considered more valuable. The right hemisphere process music, body language, works in a more intuitive way, and approaches things as a hole. Notice that no education system thought children to dance with the same determination they thought them mathematics. Education was mainly focused in training the left hemisphere; by better educating, valuating, rewarding and nurturing those abilities. They used to train students in order to develop skills similar to computers.

According to Brian Christian many people consider the history of AI a dehumanizing process; however it can also be considered as the opposite. We build these algorithms and computers imitating what we know about us, leveraging all the understanding of ourselves that we have. Subsequently we can see where they make a mistake. That error always has something new to teach us about who we are.

Conclusions

The inhuman gave us an appetite for the human; Computers and education helped us understand our need to change the priorities of the brain areas we focus in. We might have already seen the high-water mark of the left hemisphere bias; and started our return to a more balanced view of the brain and the mind.

This new level of understanding bring us real benefits including increased drive towards invention and creativity and increased positive emotions and enhancing our mental states.

Music Function

Making music is one of our most basic instincts. There’s a reason we refer to music as the “universal language”; there has been no known human culture without music. Dancing and music came before agriculture, and possibly even before language. Bone flutes were found in Europe dating back 53,000 years ago.

Music has the ability to change the emotional and physical status of people, whether they are in bad moods, good moods, or sad moods. Music can also make people feel the suspense or excitement while watching a movie.

Music is part of the complex organism that is the human being and emotional expression is a very great part of that. I would prefer to say that music is a unique way of knowing the world, which goes along with other ways of knowing the world: visual, linguistic, phonetic, psychological, and mathematical.

Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own particular ways, very culturally specific ways.

Different types of music directly trigger different emotions. While happiness causes you to breathe faster, sadness causes a rise in blood pressure and temperature and a slower pulse. Faster music played in a major key caused the same physical reactions associated with happiness, and slower music played in a minor key resulted in those associated with sadness.

We may wonder what is the utility that music provides to humanity, and if there is one indeed. There are tree main theories that try to explain this mystery:

1. Music evolved through sexual selection - Charles Darwin
2. Music allowed for social cohesion on a larger scale than was available to more primitive primates, which create and enforce group ties through the physical process of mutual grooming - Robin Dumbar
3. The enjoyment of music is just a “happy accident,” a by-product of mental mechanisms that evolved for other purposes - Steven Pinker

What is music for? How does it work? What can it teach us? We feel there must be answers to such questions, but they tend to be scattered throughout a wide range of different areas of study, from acoustics to music history, from psychology to composition. This makes the answers very difficult to find.

The evolution of religion

For those who are looking toward the future and are spiritually inclined, it is often difficult to find a path or practice that makes deep sense. It’s difficult to find a spiritual path that has a truly contemporary orientation—one that doesn’t compel us to embrace ancient belief structures that may no longer be relevant to our time.

As the world evolves, as knowledge grows, and as life conditions change, we change. For religion to remain relevant and effective as a source of spiritual guidance and support for billions of people, it too must change.

Today, the world’s great religions find themselves at a critical juncture. Adhering to values and beliefs that are often thousands of years old, they are finding it increasingly difficult to provide the spiritual guidance and moral authority necessary to face the challenges of modern society. So the question is: Can the great religious traditions of the world reinvent themselves in order to address the needs and hopes of a complex, materialistic, and increasingly secular twenty-first-century world?

Peter Savastano said "Part of the problem is that religious authorities, unable to appreciate the value of metaphor, allegory and symbol, insist on literal and historicist interpretations of doctrine and dogma. For example, within my own tradition as much as I marvel at the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, I simply have no personal experience of One God in Three Distinct Persons, even though I spend a great deal of time meditating on the Trinity in my own personal spiritual life. As one Catholic priest friend recently put it, 'The Trinity. That was a fourth-century answer to a fourth-century problem'".

"I encounter more and more people who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” What exactly does this category of self-identity mean? Perhaps anthropology can offer some clues. Anthropologists of religion recognize that there is a universal human capacity to wonder at the mysteries of life and death, and a need to make sense of or find meaning in the strange circumstances we find ourselves in. Drawing on the insights of the anthropology of religion, it seems it is universally common for human beings to strive to make meaning of the mysteries of birth, life, death, and the cosmos". - Savastano reflected.

The religious landscape of the future is likely to see a greater capacity for ambiguity. Along with globalization and rapid technological advancement comes increasing complexity. As a result of this complexity the human capacity for spirituality can no longer be met now or in the future by a one-size-fits-all approach to religion.

The art instinct

Although we humans recognize instinct when we see it in animals, often we're reluctant to see it in ourselves. We prefer to rest assured that we are above all that. We are not slaves to primitive impulses. Our free-willed choices are the result of careful rational deliberation. Yet, the human race has been subjected to the same evolutionary pressures as other animals, so the lack of instinct in humans would truly be odd. It is much more likely that the process of evolution — in both natural selection and sexual selection as described by Charles Darwin — has molded our brains with particular strengths, weakness, and proclivities. Let's call these traits "human nature."

According to the late Stephen Jay Gould, for example, — art is inconsequential to human survival and procreation, and hence cannot be explained by evolution. Art is one of the inexplicable byproducts of the large human brain, a spandrel of evolution, as Gould called them.

Unlike Gould, Dutton Argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. He thinks that the interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations.

Dutton states that the type of painting that is preferred by most people around the globe is, of course, the landscape, and a very particular landscape — one with water, food sources, trees, hiding places, and a path to perhaps another source of food or comfort. It is, in short, the savanna, the home of our Pleistocene ancestors during the period in which we became recognizably human. Our preference for this environment is wired into our brains for "savannas contain more protein per square mile than any other landscape type" as well as offering protection from predators (quickly climb up the tree).

To humans, the language ability is innate, even if the particular language a child first learns is cultural. Seemingly equally innate is the ability of children for make-believe, to construct worlds that mix fantasy (invisible teapot and teacups) with the real (tea always pours down, not up), and to keep the rules of these worlds separate and distinct. Also innate to most children (beginning at the age of 2 or so) is theory of mind — the ability to recognize that other people have internal lives similar to our own, but at the same times uniquely theirs. Consequently, perhaps the oldest art form is storytelling: What began undoubtedly with stories told around the campfire led eventually to more elaborate spoken narratives of legends, written narratives (the Iliad and Odyssey), plays, novels, film, and (much more recently) narrative-based videogames.

What's crucial is that these narratives (either historical, or partly historical, or purely fictional) help us survive. Stories give our brains an opportunity to work out contingencies of response to possible future events. (If a kitten jumps at everything that moves, it is better able to pounce on a real mouse when one shows up.) If we come upon a situation similar to one we once heard about in a story, we are much more likely to deal successfully with that situation and survive to pass on the "storytelling genes." Stories also provide examples of many kinds of people and how their minds work, and hence help us deal with others in social situations. Imaginative storytelling is one of the survival instincts that is packaged into human intelligence.

Dutton concludes that art is an inevitably intrinsic part of human nature, human intelligence, and (no one should be surprised) human sexuality.

Joy and Happiness

Happiness is an expansion, a connection; is connecting with another person, with nature, with a situation. You feel joy when you're not really aware of yourself as distinct. The separateness that comes with all those other things like anger and fear, make you feel like you're a little isolated thing having an awful time.

When we think of happiness, children often come to mind; that the drive for happiness is one that motivates our daily actions, even in adulthood. It's one of the basic emotions that include anger and surprise. This drive for happiness impels you to seek out the things that make us feel good. Almost all the things that bring you joy now are things that brought you joy in your childhood. Every day there's something to discover in nature, and in culture, actually, but you knew as a child you really are discovering something every day. Then if you can bring that into your adult life; you wake up every day thinking there are things to learn and discover and to delight you with, then you're going to have a fair bit of joy in your life.

It is interesting to remember that emotions can be contagious, so you can be in a group and if the group is generally, you know positive, enthusiastic, those emotions can be contagious and if it's a fairly cynical group that can be contagious. And organizations are big social systems where they can create environments that facilitate and help people to increase their wellbeing or, in fact, can decrease it. And I think there's been far too little attention to that area so those are the types of things that I'm especially interested in, and understanding what creates a healthy environment where people are able to learn how to utilize their emotions in ways that benefit themselves and others. In my mind, in turn, it spreads back out into society.

Most of the people think that joy decreases with age but there's an emerging set of research that's showing that with aging the part of that regulates negative emotions actually becomes better able to do it, and, in a sense, takes the brakes off the positive emotions. So they end up being less anxious, less neurotic and so on (this is in normal ageing). And the question of course has been 'why would that happen?' And up until now a lot of neuroscience research hasn't addressed this question because they say, 'well surely evolution hasn't selected for something that would improve function after the productive years', that evolution would only select for something in the years when children can be produced. Who knows? Maybe it happens because our ancestors used to live longer than we do.

Happiness is a strange notion for scientists. What is the psychological state called "happiness" for? It can't be that natural selection designed us to feel good all the time out of sheer good will. Presumably our brain circuits for happiness motivate us to accomplish things that enhance biological fitness. With that simple insight one can make some sense of some of the puzzles of happiness that wise men and women have noted for thousands of years. For example, directly pursuing happiness is often a recipe for unhappiness, because our sense of happiness is always calibrated with respect to other people.

Perhaps we can make sense of this by putting ourselves in the shoes of the fictitious engineer behind natural selection. What should the circuit for happiness be doing? Presumably it would be assessing how well you're doing in your current struggle in life, whether you should change your life and try to achieve something different, or whether you should be content with what you're achieved so far, for example, when you are well-fed, comfortable, with a mate, in a situation likely to result in children and so on. But how could a brain be designed in advance to assess that? There's no absolute standard for well-being. A Paleolithic hunter-gatherer should not have fretted that he had no running shoes or central heating or penicillin. How can a brain know whether there is something worth striving for? Well, it can look around and see how well off other people are. If they can achieve something, maybe so can you. Other people anchor your well-being scale and tell you what you can reasonably hope to achieve.

Jealousy

Jealousy is seen as a negative force. It's the main fuel for crimes of passion and is linked with brutality, including domestic violence, and even murder. But the great psychologist Sigmund Freud believed that it's not only normal, it's actually desirable to feel jealous. And like all other emotions it's developed to give us the best guess at what's happening in our lives.

The thinking is that the emotions systems developed to give us instant solutions to commonly experienced problems in our environment. That meant that very quickly the whole body could respond. So it's not just a thought thing but that literally the emotions play an important role in coordinating the internal functions; heart rate, respiration, muscle tension and the like. So these developed really to give us very instant kinds of solutions to commonly experienced – either threats or opportunities – in our environment; things that related to surviving in comfortable ways.

People are at their healthiest and at their happiest when they're involved in satisfying relationships; whether we're talking about childhood or we're talking about adulthood. Engaging in satisfying relationships is associated with all kinds of wonderful things; lower cardiovascular threat, greater immune system response, greater wellbeing. And so what jealousy does is it alerts you and impels you to the threat that your relationship is going to be lost. I like to call jealousy a social emotion as opposed to kind of a more basic emotion. And most of us accept the view that we have basic emotions like anger and fear that impel us to flee a danger or to attack a conflict. Social emotions are emotions that you're going to see in social species like humans, and what they do is help us navigate our social landscape, much as more basic emotions help us navigate the physical one.

The main point about jealousy is it's not just about, is my partner having sex with someone, or is my partner saying 'I love you' to someone – because that only happens in terms of romantic relationships at a certain stage of one's life. It's really about protecting valued relationships at all stages of life, because you have to be successful as a child in protecting relationships to reach sexual maturity. And then you have to be able to form relationships with romantic partners as well as with other individuals to help you succeed in life, and it's the grand total of that that I think makes you lead a very adaptive life, both in terms of propagating your genetic material, but also in terms of having a life well lived.

All humans at kind of a very innate level have the capacity to feel jealous, and will feel it when they sense that the relationship is being threatened, but that's the integral part. What determines when you feel that your relationship is being threatened, that varies a lot by cultural, by social learning, by past experiences. So think about your friends, you co-workers. Some individuals may react incredibly jealously when their partner simply smiles at someone else, and other people that doesn't bother them at all. And I think that is related to how the actions by their partner make them feel about themselves. Some people who have different secure levels of attachment may be more or less jealous by a certain act. And some cultures allow certain interactions between men and women that other cultures proscribe, and I think as we grow through our lives we're constantly tuning our threat detection mechanisms, so to speak, based on our past experiences and based on our culture.