From the Internet / MBTI meme:
(Guess which I am?)
A fellow AI Ted Talk conférencière, Janelle Shane, runs a blog called AI Weirdness. It’s given me a few good laughs over the years.
However, I find human weirdness far more delightful. Humans are more naturally weird. AI is by definition calculated because it’s an algorithm. So nothing AI does will ever truly feel natural. Even if the algorithm is programmed make random choices, this is still a program. It’s inherently limited to existing choices and data. This means it can never do anything truly original, because it’s pulling from existing elements. This is what Federico Garcia Lorca described as “imagination” in his brilliant essay “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion.” Every artist should read this essay. Imagination can create some good works, but less “alive” than inspiration, and evasion.
As humans, we run on programs as well, societal programming, cultural programming, media and marketing and stories and human history up until now, telling us what to believe, desire and do. These programs run very deep. They exist in every institution, from governments to the literati. The path of enlightenment, healing, or becoming more human + more divine at the same time, is largely being able to see and shrug off this programming, or to constantly challenge your mind and your body to experience against this programming.
The way humans should evolve to the rise of AI is to become even more human. This is because the competition between machine and human is an illusion, largely generated by poorly thought out goals in the industry, and a masculine-biased mindset towards competition and comparison. AI does certain things better than humans, but other things so poorly compared to its counterpart that it is like training an orangutan to be a lemur. It is strange, futile, and in the end a bit ridiculous. It’s best to let the orangutan be an orangutan, and the lemur a lemur, and figure out how they can work and play together. I will write another post on the differences between machines and humans, based on all my years in the industry working to bring these machines to “life” to imitate humans best they can, at least in the context of conversational interactions. However, the current atmosphere of fear and friction can be used for a good end: it can reveal our true identities as humans, what that means.
Back to weirdness… in the process, natural weirdness from humans is something to be gently preserved, as many great things are borne out of weirdness. Don’t let history tell you otherwise… no matter how stories are scrubbed clean, all the most interesting people and most precious moments in human history were a little or a lot weird.
Naturally so. Weirdness is a natural byproduct of staying on one’s path and being true to oneself, like a displaced alien wandering the streets, or a lumpy twisted apple growing in the wilderness.