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In our relentless pursuit of technological advancement, we find ourselves in the midst of creating machines that serve as our proxies in various realms. These surrogates, woven with artificial intelligence, seamlessly mimic our actions and thoughts, blurring the line between human agency and machine execution. As our symbiotic relationship with these creations deepens, questions about identity, autonomy, and the essence of being human take center stage.
Norbert Wiener was a MIT mathematician and philosopher who worked in the field of cybernetics exploring the relationship between machines, humans, and information, and the blurring boundaries between these entities in the future. In his book published in 1950, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, he wrote:
“The machine like the djinee... will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine...is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.”
He raised early warnings regarding intelligent machines and advocated for increased moral and societal accountability among scientists and technologists in an era marked by rapidly expanding capabilities for both constructive and potentially harmful endeavors. He further mentioned:
“ No person should calmly transfer to the machine made in his own image the responsibility for his choice of good and evil, without continuing to accept a full responsibility for that choice.”
Today, these learnings are even more important as we use technologies such as Large Lange Models (LLMs) powered Chatbots, recommender systems built into social media platforms that make choices on which post to read, what music to listen to and events we should go to. These technologies make decisions on our behalf.
There is a need for these surrogate machines to internalize the human values that vary based on the society they operate in. As these surrogate machines continue to play pivotal roles in our lives, the imperative arises for them to assimilate the spectrum of human values inherent to the societies they engage with. By embracing and adapting to these varying values, they can navigate the diversity of cultural nuances and foster harmonious interactions between humans and technology.
The future
Norbert Wiener's evocative notion of a "machine of flesh and blood" encapsulates the enigmatic intersection of human and machine. In this intricate dance, the boundaries blur, leaving us to ponder the elusive demarcation between the mechanical and the human. As these two entities converge, we grapple with a profound uncertainty, questioning where one entity fades into the other, and a new paradigm of existence emerges.
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