Post-Human Futures

Human Enhancement, Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory

Mark Carrigan, Douglas V. Porpora, Mark Carrigan, Douglas V. Porpora

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351189934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological 'advances' introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of 'essentialism' that justifies providing a 'decent minimum life' for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.

1 Being human (or what?) in the digital matrix land

The construction of the humanted

Pierpaolo Donati

When does digital-based enhancement become (really) human?

If we define digital-based enhancement as the use of technological tools (such as information and communication technology [ICT], artificial intelligence [AI] and robots) to increase the capacities of human persons, groups and social organizations to overcome certain limitations internal or external to them, the problem that opens up is understanding how and to what extent ‘the human’ and its dignity are modified.

The challenge is great due to two complex sets of reasons: first, because the human is difficult to define, as its boundaries are always historically open; second, because digital devices are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialize), our conception of reality (our metaphysics), our interactions with reality (our agency) and much more (Floridi 2015).

In volume I of this series (Donati 2019), I supported the thesis that enhancement through digital technologies is more human the more it allows those intersubjective and social relationships that realize the humanization of the person. This argument is not found in most of the current literature, where enhancement is assessed with reference to the body and/or to the mind of the individual and, in some way, to his relations, but not to social relations as such. The topic of ‘relational enhancement’, as I understand it, is underdeveloped, if not virtually unexplored.

The aforementioned thesis is motivated by how digital technologies increasingly change social and human relations. That is why, in volume II (Donati 2020), I proposed to analyse the processes of hybridization of social identities, relations and social organizations in order to understand under which conditions the enhancement brought about by the digital revolution can shape organizational forms that are capable of promoting, rather than alienating, humanity.

In volume I (Donati 2019: section 2.2), I introduced the concept of ‘Matrix Land’ as the pervasive environment of digital (virtual) reality in which humanity is destined to live ever further from its natural origin. The digital technological matrix (DTM) can be defined as the globalized symbolic code that governs the creation of digital technologies designed to enhance or replace human action, radically changing social identities and relationships. By modifying human action, digital technology conditions the human persons who use it to the point that the DTM changes their identities together with the social relations that constitute them (given that identities and social relations are co-constitutive).

The challenge posed by Matrix Land is that of a future society, however uncertain, in which the cognition of historical time will be lost and, with it, also the classical (Euclidean) notion of space. Time and space become illusions. Virtual reality will prevail over human nature so that human beings will think that what previously appeared real to them was on the contrary pure illusion.¹ From the point of view of the radical supporters of the DTM, reality exists only in the mind. Virtual logic will supersede analogical thought. What then will be left of the human?

For those who are fully immersed in Matrix Land, human reality is not something to understand or explain in order to remedy some of its defects but only a set of images hidden in the back of the human brain, formed on the basis of electrical stimulations aroused by the perceptions of the five bodily senses. The senses capture all kinds of stimulations, which come from both human beings and from every other non-human entity, mixed in such a way that the human reality conceived in the brain takes on unprecedented characteristics. Which ones?

According to the developments in quantum physics and biogenetics, our processes of imagination will allow us tomorrow to create something that today seems impossible or imaginative. In Matrix Land, the Mind creates what future society will concretely make possible. For example, thinking that human beings can fly will lead society to allow them, in the near or distant future, to actually fly – obviously only when it shall have the right tools to make it happen.

In this contribution I would like to evaluate this perspective to understand what it implies from the point of view of what ‘being human’ could mean in Matrix Land.

The rationale of my argument is that, in order to achieve a truly human enhancement, it is not enough to improve the abilities and performances of an individual (its body and/or mind) or a social group or organization, but it is necessary to verify that enhancement operations have positive repercussions on the persons’ social (i.e., ‘relational’) life. I wonder what kinds of social relations between humans are favoured (or impeded) by digital technologies and how the tools of digital enhancement affect human persons from the point of view of their intersubjective and social relations. Applying a digital device – no matter how intelligent it is – in order to improve the performances of an individual or a group of people is completely insufficient to affirm that this action of enhancement has properly human consequences. If so, under what conditions can we say that enhancement based on digital tools respects or favours human dignity rather than putting it at risk or damaging it?

Enhancement, digital revolution and social relations

During the first Industrial Revolution, in the cultural climate of the Enlightenment, the human being was often conceived as a machine (see L’Homme Machine by J. O. de La Mettrie published in 1747). Yet until the twenty-first century, human relations have been regarded as distinct from mechanical relationships. The digital revolution threatens to erase this distinction. It is as if a new Enlightenment² is reformulating the idea of the machine and the idea of the human being within a single, conforming digital code. In this way, the relationships between humans and those between humans and machines (or animals, or whatever) become assimilable.

Accordingly, one wonders: what is the difference in relationality that connects human beings with mindless machines compared with the relationality between human and machines equipped with an autonomous artificial mind? The crucial point concerns the possibility that the distinction between the personhood of humans and that of smart machines might disappear (Warwick 2015), so as to decree the death of the old humanism focused on that distinction (Breslau 2000). No wonder that even the distinction between interhuman relations and other kinds of relations (e.g., with non-human living beings or material things) disappears. This is the putative miracle of the DTM. The I-Thou relationship theorized by Martin Buber can now be applied to the relations that people have with their supercomputer, a bat or extraterrestrials provided that they have a first-person perspective, since “thou-ness is not distinct to humans.”³

In my opinion, this view is based on the assumption that the identity of an entity relies entirely upon its mind (first-person perspective) and does not depend on the quality and structure of the relations that their physical or body structure, albeit enhanced, can allow. This argument forgets that between identities and relationships there are non-random connections that are specific generative mechanisms on which the outcomes depend, for instance the flowering or alienation of the human (as we will see by commenting on Figure 1.1). If we understand relationships as expressions of a self-reflective mind (which thinks in the first person), we digitize human beings in the same way as animals and any other object.

In order to understand the specific identity of the human mind, it is useful to assume that a mind, in the abstract, is an effect (a relational entity) emerging from interactions between its constitutive elements working together, making it a product of three components – brain + stimulating factors (internal & external) + the autonomous contribution of the relations between brain and stimulating factors – which is the third component of the emergent effect that is the operating mind.

Does the AI/robot’s mind have the same third component (the autonomous role of the connecting relations) as the human mind? My answer is negative: the human and artificial minds are two incommensurable orders of reality because of their structurally different relationality, both internally and externally.

Identity is formed in relationships, and vice versa, relationships are formed through identities, which means that the process of interactions can have different outcomes, depending on whether the process occurs in a conflationary way between identity and relations or instead distinguishes them analytically over time as realities of different orders. Not any kind of interaction leads to the fulfilment of the human person. Between an arrangement in which interactions are of a reproductive type (morphostatic) and an arrangement in which they are of a chaotic type (turbulent morphogenesis) there are innumerable different configurations of which it is difficult to appreciate their more or less humanizing character. Consider, for example, the self-description of a groundbreaking high-tech company of AI researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists, artists and innovative thinkers called SoulMachines. This company aims at re-imagining what is possible in human computing with the following declaration on its website:

We bring technology to life by creating incredibly life-like, emotionally responsive Digital Humans with personality and character that allow machines to talk to us literally face-to-face! Our vision is to humanize computing to better humanity. We use Neural Networks that combine biologically inspired models of the human brain and key sensory networks to create a virtual central nervous system that we call our Human Computing Engine. When you ‘plug’ our engaging and interactive Digital Humans into our cloud-based Human Computing Engine, we can transform modern life for the better by revolutionizing the way AI, robots and machines interact with people.

It is then a matter of analysing what kind of hybridization between the human being and the machine is produced by the different forms of enhancement, and what consequences are produced in social relations, and therefore in the whole organization of society.

I would like to analyse this topic by looking at how the historical evolution of technologies is changing both the natural order and the social order through the practical order of reality.

Confronting the digital matrix: the emergence of the humanted

The transition to the humanted

Human identity, and its humanization, passes through the relationality of the mind in connection with its internal and external environments. It becomes essential to understand how these relationships change in different technological environments.

In Table 1.1 I summarize the transition from the pre-DTM historical phase to the advent phase of DTM and to the further development of DTM.

(I) In the pre-matrix phase, machines can be more or less sophisticated, but they are not ‘thinking’. Therefore human beings use them as instruments that can be mastered, even if the users are also affected by the instruments they use. In any case, human relationships remain clearly distinct from machinic (automatic) relations. Knowledge and communication are of an analogical type. Society is still seen as the exclusive domain of human beings, who are supposed to be its architects and its ‘centre’ (anthropocentrism).

(II) In the transformation phase, the traditional sectors of society that operate in analogue mode (including analogue machines) are increasingly replaced by smart

Table 1.1 How the digital technological matrix progressively transforms humanness and society

(I) Before the digital matrix:	(II) Transition to the digital matrix:	(III) A society driven by the digital matrix
‘Man architect’ (Homo faber)	‘(Re)constructed man’ (Homo aedificatus)	‘Digital man’ (Homo digitalis)
Analogical code (classic ontology and epistemology)	Binary code (dialectic ontology and epistemology)	Quantum code (qubit) (relationalist ontology and epistemology)
The human being can design and master the machine, which is an instrumental and passive tool for practical activities	Technologies become more intelligent and autonomous so that their relations ‘redefine’ the human being	Human beings become accustomed to digital relations and take digital features from them (generation of the humanted)
Identities and social relations are supposed to reflect given-for-granted human features, since knowledge and communication are analogical	Identities and social relations become mentalized and hybridized, be...