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Diplomat, economist, playwright; cofounder (with Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego), La Ciudad de las Ideas; coauthor (with Clotaire Rapaille), Move UP: Why Some Cultures Advance While Others Don’t
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To answer the 2015 Edge Question, we should start by knowing a little bit about who we are. So let’s begin by talking about our most significant organ, the brain. A simplified schema of this complex structure divides it into three parts: the cortex (responsible for rational processes), the limbic (supporting functions including emotion and motivation), and the reptilian (where our most fundamental and primitive drives, survival and reproduction, reside).
The debate about how to think about thinking machines tends to gravitate toward our cortical and limbic brains. The cortex allows us to more accurately assess the cost/benefit that AI carries, regarding things like the relative costs to business of human versus robot labor and the relative value of human versus digital capital, as well as concerns about bioethics, privacy, and national security. It also enables us to plan, attract more and better funding for research and development, and define our public-policy priorities.
In parallel, our limbic brain helps us take precautions and respond with fear or excitement toward the risks or opportunities of developing AI. Here the panacea and the technophobia are immediate emotional reactions. Common fears include being manipulated or replaced by machines; the opportunities include machine expansion of our memory and facilitation of the daily tasks of life.
But we must also be aware of the powerful—even dominant—role of the reptilian brain in our thinking. This means becoming aware of our most primitive responses, our most territorial and emotive way of thinking about the concepts of thinking, machine, robot, intelligence, artificial, natural, and human. The primary preoccupation of the reptilian brain is survival, and although it’s not much talked about, the quest for survival is at the heart of our hopes and fears about thinking machines. When we study ancient archetypes, or literature, or the projections in the contemporary debate reflected in the Edge Question, a recurrent subconscious instinctive appears: the reptilian binomial, death versus immortality.
Our fear of death is doubtless behind the collective imagining of robots that reproduce and, with their superior thinking, betray and destroy their creators. Such machines seem to pose the most horrifying danger—that of the extinction of everything that matters to us. But our reptilian brains also see in them the savior; we hope that superintelligent machines will offer us eternal life and youth. Intimations of these ways of thinking are embedded in our language. While in English the terms robot and machine are genderless, the Latin languages, as well as German, differentiate between them: el robot is masculine, dangerous, and fearsome, whereas la máquina is feminine, protective, and caring.
Jeremy Bentham defined man as a rational being, but we know we’re not. All of us sometimes think and act irrationally because of the power of the reptilian brain, and the reptilian drives have been, and remain, at the heart of the evolution of intelligence. Feeling is what is most profound about thinking. A machine that grows exponentially in speed of data processing every eighteen months, that defeats natural intelligence in a game of chess by sorting through a zillion options move by move, and that can accurately diagnose diseases is highly impressive, but this isn’t what it means to think. In order for us to achieve the dream of thinking machines, they’ll have to understand and question values, suffer internal conflicts, experience intimacy.
When thinking about machines that think, we should ask ourselves reptilian questions, such as, Would you risk your life for a machine? Would you let a robot be a political leader? Would you be jealous of a machine? Would you pay taxes to ensure a robot’s well-being? Would you put tulips on your robot’s tomb? Or, more important, Would my robot put tulips on my tomb?
Acknowledging the power of the reptilian in our thinking about machines that think helps us to see more clearly the implications, and nature, of a machine that can genuinely doubt and commit, and the kind of AI we should aspire to. If our biology designed culture as a tool for survival and evolution, nowadays our natural intelligence should lead us to create machines that feel and are instinctual; only then will immortality overcome death.
