I have had far too many conversations lately, and perhaps so have you, in which my interlocutor confidently or desperately attempts to assert what really, truly, and finally sets us humans apart from the increasingly clever and voluble machines. I’ve heard, for instance, that our value lies in our capacity for intention, or consciousness, or the perception of meaning, or morality, or community, or worship, or the survival instinct. There was a time, not so long ago, when such claims might have rested on the size of our brains, or the dexterity of our thumbs, or the use of language—so much for that one. So much for most of them.
Of course, concepts such as consciousness, intention, empathy, meaning, and morality are not particularly well defined or agreed upon among those who consider themselves philosophers. We don’t know what they mean well enough to know what they are not. That non-falsifiability can be a helpful bulwark. But I’m not sure it’s the sort of wax I’d plug a hole with.
In addition to having much, much bigger data-center brains than we do, AI systems today do seem capable of establishing intention, mirroring a conversation partner’s tone and mood, interpreting and manipulating semantics, and changing behavior through moral reasoning. I won’t get into consciousness, because I’m a panpsychist, so I don’t think it’s an especially unique characteristic of anything. Many self-described humans don’t bother with worship. We’re running out of things to hinge our uniqueness on.
Western philosophy has an old habit of establishing the value of human beings on what makes us distinct, and especially what makes us better than everything else in the universe. Going back to Aristotle and his ilk, the favorite source of uniqueness was our ability to reason, along with our capacity for virtue and political life. Versions of this have survived up to more or less the present. Sure, as scientists (and people with pets) have examined the behavior of non-human animals, the line has gotten more fuzzy; animals actually do exhibit versions of reason, politics, morality, complex emotion, and so forth. But since we are usually more powerful than them, most of us have been able to confidently maintain that our version of those things is superior.
Let’s trouble the “we” a bit further. As Sylvia Wynter showed through her analysis of colonial cultures, humanity has never consisted of all homo sapiens. Rather, the “humanity” that is the subject of, say, human rights and human dignity, was always premised on superiority over other humans who supposedly did not possess that value—the people who could be enslaved or eradicated, the people whose pain does not register or matter. To have equality for some, there must be others considered subhuman.
One reason for this is a sort of grim convenience; if rulers want to conquer land and compel labor, they will also want a way to justify subjugation. It’s also an extension of the old Aristotelian habit. My value, remember, depends on me being different and better than those who are not like me. It is ironic, tragic, and worse, that such a view has been considered Christian—a faith premised on God modeling an ideal humanity as a suffering servant.
The longing to specify human superiority reminds me of a warning Augustine of Hippo voiced several times: Beware of taking your boutique interpretation of scripture too literally. Interpret away, sure! But have some humility. Because if you hitch your faith to an interpretation of the creation story in Genesis, for instance, and some new fact of science comes along and smashes your little theory, you risk losing your whole faith with it.
This is precisely what happened among Anglophone Christians in the nineteenth century, as I documented in the book I once wrote about God. Before research universities became a thing, it was a business model of sorts for scientifically inclined English gentlemen to become country parsons for pay, preaching on Sundays and studying the local flora and fauna the rest of the week. To justify their hustle, they also published books extolling how the intricacy of the natural world testifies to the glorious and direct handiwork of God. The books became quite popular, further advancing the business model. And then along came Charles Darwin, who almost became a parson but didn’t, and who advanced a theory that proposed an orthogonal account of nature’s glory. Many a person’s faith was lost as a result. Notably, this was not a problem common among people outside the English-reading world, among those who had never become enamored with the parsons’ particular version of creationism.
This was what Augustine warned about: Don’t rest the most important things on your petty notions. And the worst petty notions, as Wynter pointed out, are those that draw lines to justify cruelty. Thus we can offer a corrective to all of Western anthropology: Don’t premise our value on what we think makes us superior. Superiority usually turns out to be illusory, or transient at best.
Fortunately, the Aristotelian theory of human worth is not the only old story we can turn to in a time such as this. A Confucian story rests human value on roles and relationships; Indian traditions want to transcend individuality in favor of ultimate unity; many place-based cultures ground human value in primordial gifts from regional animals or landforms.
Computers are different sorts of things than us, and it’s likely that we will always find ways to see that difference, regardless of how much we train them to imitate us. But it can be hard to predict where that difference will lie. Defining human value according to some differentiating thing will always bear a risk: that thing may no longer be always only ours. It may go the way of using language, or doing complex math, or writing college essays. By trying to maintain confidence in one’s superiority, one runs the risk of losing something more important.
My supposition is that the most durable premise of human value is simply, or not so simply, the mystery of being human. Maybe the tech bros are right and the machines will become utterly superior to us in every way we thought made us unique. Who cares? We can still be valuable to ourselves and each other. If we have a sense for the divine, we can go further and say that our value is in the giftedness of our lives. But you could get most of the way just by leaning on the subjective experience of being, and being in relationship.
That’s it, and that’s enough. We have value because we have value to ourselves. No robot overlords can take that away, and we should not let them try. We matter because we matter. Exceptionalism is a much more dangerous game.