The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger
5 of 5 stars

I’ve been long searching for a book which could explain the philosophical foundations upon which the edifice of today’s AI frameworks has been built and finally got few answers in this book.

The book starts with human mind’s relationship to reality. Human perception and lived experience, augmented by a reasoning mind, has long defined our understanding of reality. This human conception of reality has been exclusive to our species since natural evolution endowed us with consciousness and made us the dominant species on the Earth, but according to the authors, that is about to change. With the latest advances in the field of artificial intelligence, our species is at the cusp of bringing a new alien form of intelligence into this world. And that might have unintended consequences.

Humans have responded to, and reconciled with, the environment by identifying phenomena we can study and eventually explain it either scientifically, theologically, or both. Each historical epoch has been characterized by a set of interlocking explanations of reality and social, political, and economic arrangements based on either faith or reason. The Classical world, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Modern world all cultivated their concepts of the individual and society, theorizing about where and how each fit into the enduring order of things. When prevailing understanding no longer sufficed to explain perceptions of reality — events experienced, discoveries made, other cultures encountered — revolutions in thought (and sometimes in politics) occurred, and a new epoch was born.

The emerging AI age is increasingly posing that kind of epochal challenges to today’s concept of reality.

Are humans and AI approaching the same reality from different standpoints, with complementary strengths? Or do we perceive two different, partially overlapping realities: one that humans can elaborate through reason and another that AI can elaborate through algorithms?

When the digital world began to expand decades ago, there was no expectation that creators would or should develop a philosophical framework or define their fundamental relationship to national or global interests… there was little demand for predictions about how these virtual solutions might affect the values and behaviour of entire societies…In order for individual, national, and international actors to reach informed conclusions about their relationship to AI – and to one another – we must seek a common frame of reference.

In any case an AI moral code is a necessity now. AGI will soon become pervasive and three options available to humans will be to constrain, partner or defer to AGI in our decision-making process. And in some cases, it is likely to go further, and this choice will be dictated by AGI itself. If humanity needs a viable future, then it needs to agree on a set of moral principles that will guide AGI to make these choices.

The book covers the famed allegory of the Plato’s cave that spoke to the centrality of the Human mind’s quest for Reality. Styled as a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, the allegory likens humanity to a group of prisoners chained to the wall of a cave. Seeing shadows cast on the wall of the cave from the sunlit mouth, the prisoners believe them to be reality.

The humanity, Socrates held, is akin to the prisoner who can break free of the shackles, ascends to level ground, and perceives reality in the full light of day. Similarly, the Platonic quest to glimpse the true form of things supposed the existence of an ideal — reality toward which humanity has the capacity to journey even if never quite reach. The conviction that what we see reflects reality — and that we can fully comprehend at least aspects of this reality using discipline and reason is at the centre of understanding our own consciousness and for birthing AGI.

The authors then attempt to cover the philosophical journey of AI evolution. It started with how Spinoza in his Ethics in 1677 sought to arrive at the underlying system of truths through the application of reason alone. At the pinnacle of human knowledge, Spinoza held, was the mind’s ability to reason its way toward contemplating the eternal — to know “the idea of the mind itself” and to recognize, through the mind, the infinite and ever-present “God as cause.” This knowledge, Spinoza held, was eternal — the ultimate and indeed perfect form of knowledge.

Then Berkeley in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 propositioned that reality consisted not of material objects but in mind whose perception of seemingly substantive reality, was indeed reality.

Later it was Kant who in his Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 suggested that human reason had the capacity to know reality deeply, albeit through an inevitably imperfect lens. Human cognition and experience filters, structures, and distorts all that we know, even when we attempt to reason “purely” by logic alone. Objective reality in the strictest sense — what Kant called the thing in itself — is ever-present but inherently beyond our direct knowledge. Kant posited a realm of noumena, or “things as they are understood by pure thought,” existing independent of experience or filtration through human concepts.

For the following two hundred years, Kant’s essential distinction between the thing in itself and the unavoidably filtered world we experience hardly seemed to matter. While the human mind might present an imperfect picture of reality, it was the only picture available. What the structures of the human mind barred from view would, presumably, be barred forever — or would inspire faith and consciousness of the infinite. Without any alternative mechanism for accessing reality, it seemed that humanity’s blind spots would remain hidden. Whether human perception and reason ought to be the definitive measure of things, lacking an alternative, for a time, they became so.

For generations after Kant, the quest to know the thing in itself took two forms: ever more precise observation of reality and ever more extensive cataloging of knowledge. Vast new fields of phenomena seemed knowable, capable of being discovered and cataloged through the application of reason. In turn, it was believed, such comprehensive catalogs could unveil lessons and principles that could be applied to the most pressing scientific, economic, social, and political questions of the day.

The scientists tried to build AI frameworks based on these conceptual frameworks governed by reason alone by introducing ever more precise observation mechanisms and ever more extensive cataloguing of knowledge but failed miserably as it was a hard problem to mimic AI as a reasoning entity in human likeness.

In the meantime, reason — in the form of advanced theoretical physics — began to progress further toward Kant’s thing in itself, with disorienting scientific and philosophical consequences. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, progress at the frontiers of physics began to reveal unexpected aspects of reality. The classical model of physics, whose foundations dated to the early Enlightenment, had posited a world explicable in terms of space, time, matter, and energy, whose properties were in each case absolute and consistent. As scientists sought a clearer explanation for the properties of light, however, they encountered results that this traditional understanding could not explain. The brilliant and iconoclastic theoretical physicist Albert Einstein solved many of these riddles through his pioneering work on quantum physics and his theories of special and general relativity. Yet in doing so, he revealed a picture of physical reality that appeared newly mysterious. Space and time were united as a single phenomenon in which individual perceptions were apparently not bound by the laws of classical physics. Developing a quantum mechanics to describe this substratum of physical reality, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr challenged long-standing assumptions about the nature of knowledge. Heisenberg emphasized the impossibility of assessing both the position and momentum of a particle accurately and simultaneously. This “uncertainty principle” (as it came to be known) implied that a completely accurate picture of reality might not be available at any given time. Further, Heisenberg argued that physical reality did not have independent inherent form but was created by the process of observation: “I believe that one can formulate the emergence of the classical ‘path’ of a particle succinctly . . . the ‘path’ comes into being only because we observe it.”

The human mind was forced to choose, among multiple complementary aspects of reality, which one it wanted to know accurately at a given moment. A full picture of objective reality, if it were available, could come only by combining impressions of complementary aspects of a phenomenon and accounting for the distortions inherent in each.

The book concludes that it was finally in 1921 that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s in his Logical-Philosophical Treatise was able to comprehend the elusive nature of reality in terms of similarities in detail.

Knowledge was to be found in generalizations about similarities across phenomena i.e. “family resemblances”: “And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.” The quest to define and catalogue all things, each with its own sharply delineated boundaries, was mistaken. Instead, one should seek to define “This and similar things” and achieve familiarity with the resulting concepts.

This laid the groundwork for the AI acceleration. Even if AI would never know something in the way a human mind could, an accumulation of matches with the patterns of reality could approximate and sometimes exceed the performance of human perception and reason. This led to the acceptance of using machine learning algorithms that can match the patterns to get us to a close approximation of reality.

The last chapter of the book covers the future of AI. Traditional reason and faith will persist in the age of AI, but their nature and scope are bound to be profoundly affected by the introduction of a new, powerful, machine-operated form of logic. Human identity may continue to rest on the pinnacle of animate intelligence, but human reason will cease to describe the full sweep of the intelligence that works to comprehend reality. To make sense of our place in this world, our emphasis may need to shift from the centrality of human reason to the centrality of human dignity and autonomy.

AGI driven world will produce unpredictable results and possibly series of dilemmas with imperfect answers but is surely going to advance a shared human culture and quest for answers beyond any national culture or value system.

We need to find ways to make AGI an effective partner in exploration and managing the existential reality. AGI could become an effective partner for humans by offering complementary perspectives on reality. In scientific discovery or any other creative work AGI with a non-human perception can act as a second mirror while reflecting the reality and helping us understand it better. This partnership means humans must adapt to a world where our reasoning is no longer the sole—or even primary—way of understanding or interacting with reality. Future of humanity is increasingly dependent on it defining its role in an AI age.

AI may take a leading role in exploring and managing both the physical and digital worlds. In specific domains, humans may defer to AI, preferring its processes to the limitations of the human mind. This deference could prompt many or even most humans to retreat into individual, filtered, customized worlds. In this scenario, AI’s power – combined with its prevalence, invisibility, and opacity – will raise questions about the prospects for free societies and even for free will.

Even the definition of pure knowledge may need to be revisited. Pure knowledge was supposed to be derived through pure reason, logic, or the inherent structures of the mind. But with the advent of AGI, we may be closer to the concept of purest form of knowledge not limited by the structures of our minds and the patterns of the conventional human thought.

Overall, a great book to understand the philosophical evolution of AI till date and how it is going to impact our future in the coming years.

Tarun Rattan

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