BLIND TO THE CORE OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

ELDAR SHAFIR

William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University; coauthor (with Sendil Mullainathan), Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

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Thinking comes in many forms, from solving optimization problems and playing chess to having a smart conversation or composing a fine piece of music. But when I think about machines that purportedly think, I wonder about what they might be thinking when the topics are inherently human, as so many topics inherently are.

Consider Bertrand Russell’s touching description in What I Have Lived For:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

Although Russell was a celebrated thinker, what he describes is, in one form or another, familiar to us all. But what would a machine make of this? Could it really feel a “longing for love” or an “unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind”? Could it be “blown . . . hither and thither . . . over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair”?

If we accept some version of the computer metaphor of the mind (and I do), then all these sentiments must ultimately be the products of physical processes, which, in theory, can be instantiated by a machine. But the topics themselves so often are human. If we agree that it’s hard for males to fully understand maternal love; that the satiated may be unable to grasp what it feels like to starve; that the free may not fully comprehend what it’s like to be imprisoned—well, then machines, no matter how well they “think,” may be unable to think of many things. And those things are at the core of human experience. At the opera, we feel for Aida, who is horrified to hear herself call out “Ritorna vincitor,” finding herself torn between her love for Radames and her devotion to her father and her people. Could a machine feel torn like Aida, or even moved like the rest of us when we see her beg the gods to pity her suffering? Can a machine experience fear of death, without living? Lust, without having sexual organs? Or the thoughts that come with headaches, wrinkles, or the common cold? It’s easy to imagine a machine dressed in a Nazi uniform and another machine we can call “Sophie.” But when the former forces the latter to make a horrific choice, can the first experience the sadism and the second an irreparable desperation of the kind rendered so palpable in Styron’s story?

If machines cannot truly experience the sort of thinking that incorporates the passions and sorrows of the likes of Russell, or Aida, or Sophie; if they cannot experience the yearnings, desires, determination, and disgrace underlying the thinking of Nabakov’s Humbert, Conrad’s Kurtz, Melville’s Ahab, or Tolstoy’s Anna; if they cannot do any of that, then perhaps they cannot really fully think.