From quite early in life, I picked up the intellectual habit of probing the intellects of great thinkers, and there are a whole tribe of them that I came into contact with right from my secondary to undergraduate and postgraduate days: Socrates, Gandhi, Plato, Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archimedes, Newton, Thomas More, Ali Mazrui, Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Awolowo, Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello, Simeon Adebo, Awojobi, Pius Okigbo, Aboyade, Mabogunje, Hawkings, Nkrumah, Martin Luther, Billy Dudley, Nelson Mandela, Claude Ake, and so on.
The list is unbelievably long. And there is only one reason why these intellects appeal to me. They provide a gateway for me to explore how they have achieved their understanding of the world around us, and how possibly one could navigate life, societal dynamics and social reconstruction as reform imperative.
Take Socrates. He was such a principled and reflective person who chose to drink the hemlock rather than capitulate to the unjust system of his time—a democratic system he criticised but which eventually found him guilty based on the mob framework he found unsalutary about democracy. Plato’s reaction to the death of his teacher is another lesson on how personal and emotional pain and sense of loss can serve as the moment for philosophical reflexivity and social engineering.
This is similar to Martin Luther’s challenge to the theological foundations of Catholicism. Socrates, Thomas More, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther are distinctive because of their audacity to speak truth to power no matter the danger to lives and limbs. Or the need to rethink the fundamental basis of the human society and its multiple institutions and processes.
On the other side of the divide, there are the scientists and mathematicians whose fundamental objectives remain the unraveling of the laws of the universe. From Copernicus to Einstein, we have a beautiful trajectory of scientific thinking that keeps wrestling with poking behind the mathematically harmonious dynamics that Pythagoras believed constitute the basic furniture of the universe. We now know more about black holes, the theory of relativity, the theory of everything, quantum mechanics, and at least an increasing understanding of the cosmos, the spiral galaxy, the Milky Way and the quirky world of quantum physics and the subatomic universe.
All thanks to the geniuses of those who are intent on knowing what the universe is made of, and how that affects and impacts human existence. What about the enormous intellectual excavation of political scientists and theorists, especially on the African continent, from Ake to Mazrui, who are daily labouring to expand our understanding of the epochal human events that have influenced our understanding of ourselves.
These are the geniuses and intellects that occupy my intellectual hobby, and also define my circle of friends that includes Professor Victor Chukwuma, a professor of physics, who is not only one of my sparring partners, but would go as far as nominating me for the prestigious Award of Excellence from the Nigerian Institute of Physics in October 2015, during the Institute’s 38th Annual Conference.
What interests me in this piece is an engagement with Stephen Hawking’s premonitions with some of the issues that are becoming definitive in the way we understand our lives, existence and world. Hawking is one of the most scientific and philosophically deep minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was not just a thoroughgoing cosmologist and theoretical physicist, but also deeply concerned about the societal impacts and implications of unbridled scientific developments.
Hawking was deeply concerned about three key issues that we can no longer gloss over as we maneuvre our world. He was worried about the fate of humanity in a world that is increasingly going askew. He once asked a most fundamental question: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?” That is a question all keen observers of the world we live in can relate with, a question that is all the more perplexing because, even for Hawking, there is no answer in sight.
That question turns on several possibilities that might transform the world in most terrible ways. Take Hawking’s unease about the possibility of an alien invasion. Their attempt to pillage the earth, for him, would have a similar outcome that Christopher Columbus’ landing in America had—annihilation of the Native Indians.
There is also the risk of nuclear war, global warming and climate change. From far away space, any contingent meteor or asteroid could slam into earth!
Aside climate change, by far the most immediate and terrifying issue humans are confronted with at the moment is the dizzyingly perplexing of artificial intelligence (AI). Hawking was so concerned that in 2015, alongside more than 1000 other experts and researchers, especially in robotics and artificial intelligence, wrote an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Argentina. It was borne out of a collective concern about the possibility of AI—and especially the dangers inherent in “a military artificial intelligence arms race”—being humanity’s “biggest existential threat” and the possibility of translating into “the end of the human race.”
These concerns enable us to highlight fundamental philosophical issues that intersects humanity and AI. The emergence of AI, and the very possibility of the arrival of a super intelligent AI, has raised serious existential and ethical questions that bother on the obsolescence of humanity. And this is because the machines are increasingly taking over almost every sphere of human activities and uniqueness. Human dominance especially in the workplace is increasingly being challenged as new robotics and intelligent machines keep rolling out to take over hitherto daunting tasks and roles that humans use to be the best at. This threatens a loss of control and extreme economic anxiety arising from the displacement of humans from their means of livelihood. Machines have the capacities to do these works cleanly, efficiently and with triple outputs than what humans can ever hope to achieve. This has several ethical and existential implications. Two are most fundamental. The first is the possibility of AI reproducing the biases and prejudices that have consistently thrown the world out of joint. The second has to do with how AI reproduces the rampant inequality that comes from the deployment of machines and robotics by the wealthy capitalists across the world.
This gloomy picture should not prevent us from the most plausible benefits that AI has already introduced into our world. The surest is the collaborative framework that enables humans to get things done faster, optimally and efficiently. In this sense, AI becomes a crucial augmentation of human cognitive capacities. In other words, with AI deployed in the most technical dimensions of human functioning, we can then have sufficient time to pursue more noble assignments and objectives.
Collaborating with AI introduces excitingly new paradigms of decision-making in so many spheres of life, from public administration to scholarship and the academics. The challenge is that of embedding human values into AI in ways that speaks to our search for genuinely universal and non-exclusionary valuational frameworks that transcends those that have taken us to countless wars.
The significance of all the above, as I see it, has to do with how AI is challenging humans to rethink what it means to be human in the Age of AI. It concerns how AI has radically compromised our self-image of who we truly are as humans. Before the emergence and operation of AI, the human world and activities are roundly embedded within a philosophical framework of humanism—humans constitute the centre of the world, and the sole arbiters of its affairs. Now, our vaunted humanistic complacence has become endangered.
The dimension of AI that is causing the most existential bafflement and fright is the rate at which AI is cancelling what we consider uniquely human, especially in terms of consciousness, intelligence and personhood. When philosophers ask about who a person is, or what personhood consists of, the terms of the discourse have usually been restricted to the context of undeniably humans. However, given the capacity of AI to advance optimally the essence of what it means to be humans—consciousness and intelligence, for example—that debate has to be restructured and reimagined. And there is no other way to restructure it that will not affect our conception of human identity and future. The distinct boundary we have erected between the natural and the artificial or between consciousness and computation no longer seem tenable.
Does artificial intelligence qualify as a person? This is one of the most fundamental questions of the twenty-first century. And it is one that we cannot get any easy answers to. And this is because the question is infused by all sorts of theological and existential traps and biases that are the remnants of our humanistic understanding of who humans are, how we got into the world, what our future is, and what we have the capabilities of achieving. Thrown in the place and role of God in human affairs, and you get the sense of how complicated the question becomes. But this does not still take away the unrelenting march of AI in human dynamics. Hawking was extremely troubled by the possibility of a race of superhumans—superintelligent machines—evolving with the capacity to determine their own objectives, and even possibly undermining our own future if it contradicts theirs. And for him, the onus of responsibility lies with humans and our capacity to avoid the risks involved.
Leaving the fate of humans to humans seems dangerous given that we created the atomic bomb, countless wars, the Holocaust and several genocides. We have created religious fundamentalism and pandemics. However, we have also created the most sublime inventions and policies that keep pulling us back from chaos. Maybe, as Hawking hoped, we are still on time to pull ourselves back from the impending precipice.
Olaopa is chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration, Abuja.
