Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
–Roy Batty (Blade Runner)
You may recognize this soliloquy from the end of the film Blade Runner. Roy Batty, a replicant—a robot—has returned to seek out his creator, his builder, to ask him to extend his four-year lifespan. Roy is fighting for his life, but at the end, despite all his struggles, he recognizes he must die and that all he is and all he knows will be relegated to oblivion. All he knows, feels, and remembers will disappear. I happened across the end of Blade Runner recently, and Roy’s speech got me to thinking.
There are many other variations on this theme. Films like Ex Machina, Companion, and In the Blink of an Eye and books like I, Robot and Klara and The Sun address issues of where pure intelligence ends and human sentience begins. What makes a machine human? Is it emotional awareness? Ambition? Empathy? Greed? What is the spark that has spurred women and men throughout history to aspire and strive to create great inventions (like AI), and great works of art? Between our five senses and the miracle of understanding lies the uniquely human ability to create meaning from patterns around us, meanings preserved in memory like pieces of amber.
It’s spring in Wisconsin—sort of. We’re on a meteorological roller coaster, sliding from eighty-degree highs down to forty-degree lows, but some of our early risers, the daffodils and crocuses, are blooming. I walked by a lilac bush the other day. The smell of the flowers, as the always do, brought back a flood of memories for me—staring up into the tangled heights of a neighbor’s lilac bush as a child, giving a middle school crush a purloined purple lilac flower, and smelling it on a gentle afternoon breeze while enjoying the spring sunshine on my face.
While relishing this particular wash of memories (which sparked dozens more), that not only inhabit my consciousness but constitute it, I realized the details of them, the deftly etched memories, will someday die with me—as Roy’s died with him. Past and future generations have known and will know the joys of the lilac bouquet, but my particular memories—and hundreds of thousands of others like it—will disappear.
Of course, along with these memories, I realized any sort of knowledge or expertise I may have acquired over my lifetime will also disappear. All that will be gone. Everything thing I know about literature, the natural world—especially lilacs, and history will disappear with me. I will become a vacuum.
Multiply this by the thousands and tens of thousands who pass away every day and the amount of lost human experience is astronomical. The knowledge, the wisdom, the humor, and the grace of all these souls will be lost to us. Each individualized reaction to the beauty—and the ugliness—in the world will be extinguished forever.
Every person, no matter how humble or insignificant, is an oasis of knowledge and experience. Every person is an encyclopedia, a museum, a symphony, and more—all those are wrapped in every consciousness, and each is an invaluable resource with us only for a very short time.
So, what’s the point? We do have the ability to pass on some of our knowledge to the next generation. Some will immortalize and preserve their experiences and sensibilities into great works of art and literature—works that speak to us through the ages. There’s a reason Shakespeare is still performed today. Homer’s Odyssey is enjoying a new modernized iteration. It, and other great works, spring from the most human of qualities: curiosity, joy, awe, and wonder.
While the innermost details of our most personal experiences—that first kiss, or first time listening to a great song (White Room by Cream?), or the sight of the sky’s starry grandeur on a dark night—will probably remain locked in our consciousness and die with us, the events themselves, shared by nearly everyone, constitute our collective consciousness.
What we’re able to communicate through our literature and science and art has been—and will be—invaluable to future generations. Our desire to pass on what excites, warms, and inspires us is what makes us human. It’s what made Roy Batty, a robot, ultimately human. The same is not true of AI.
The collective works of human discourse is what artificial intelligence uses for its database. When an AI entity is programmed, it cycles through its massive dataset of human works and uses (some say plagiarizes) those works to complete its task. To create an image, it uses a process known as diffusion. AI rearranges pixels to create an image combining elements from available data. For example, if I requested an image of a dachshund playing football, it would use “learned concepts” about dachshunds and football to create a new image (St. John’s University).
What is missing in the AI process is the human spark, that experience of seeing, sensing, and being swept away by a person, an event, or a piece of music. It is a difference articulated by the character Sean the psychologist—as played by Robin Williams—in the film Good Will Hunting as he explains to Will why his genius is not enough:
“So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.” (Never Lament Casually)
Sean might well have been talking about AI. This entity, this machine, only knows the world from secondhand experience. It cannot produce anything human because it lacks the ability to experience the world firsthand, to conceive original meaning. AI may weave together threads of great literature, art, and history, but it cannot create these threads. It might be a useful tool, and it is getting more and more refined every day, but it will never have that unique quality to attach our deeply personal beings—our sensibilities, our hearts, our souls—to something or someone outside ourselves.
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