Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and an early funder of OpenAI, recently wrote an op-ed titled “A.I. Will Empower Humanity.” In his article, which reads a bit like a long-form advertisement or press release, Hoffman tries to convince people they’ll be missing out if they don’t surrender all their data to artificial intelligence.
“So imagine a world in which an A.I. knows your stress levels tend to drop more after playing World of Warcraft than after a walk in nature,” he writes. “Imagine a world in which an A.I. can analyze your reading patterns and alert you that you’re about to buy a book where there’s only a 10 percent chance you’ll get past Page 6.”
This is supposed to be appealing, and maybe it appeals to a very particular kind of tech-oriented person. But to the rest of us, Hoffman merely highlights the narrow, entirely quantitative mindset of the tech overlords. Even the example he picks, in which more screen time results in less stress than a walk in nature, seems comically tendentious.
In Hoffman’s view, we only learn about ourselves through mathematical analysis. Any extension of our horizons — reading something new, reducing stress in a different way — is pointless. The human, he thinks, is an entirely known quantity. Forget consulting your imagination or conscience.
According to Hoffman, this is what “rationalism and enlightenment” counsel: “Do we lose something of our essential human nature if we start basing our decisions less on hunches, gut reactions, emotional immediacy, faulty mental shortcuts, fate, faith and mysticism? Or do we risk something even more fundamental by constraining or even dismissing our instinctive appetite for rationalism and enlightenment?”
Following an observation made by the popular YouTuber Jonathan Pageau, this is like arguing you should be awake all the time and never sleep. To always be rational would, paradoxically, be a kind of madness. There is no value, in Hoffman’s philosophy, to the world of dreams, the secret springs that feed the soul. But we know what happens when you are literally unable to sleep and dream: you go insane and die.
The archetype of the mad scientist exists for a reason. The mad scientist is so rational that he becomes insane. He is obviously raving mad, but his own presumption that he is rational prevents him from analyzing this very presumption. It is pathological extroversion, capable only of analyzing and manipulating the outer world while losing touch with the inner world. The mad scientist never turns the spotlight that shines outward inward and is doomed forever to evade authentic self-knowledge.
In the model of human flourishing that Hoffman proposes in his op-ed, only the apparent self matters. It is the sole source of the data AI uses to optimize our well-being. The ways we project appearances online, notoriously not the most authentic expressions, are all the AI has access to. But the deep self, the private self, is entirely ignored.
Hoffman’s eerily cloying yet cold advertisement for AI should alert people to what these tech overlords desire. They promise you an improved, optimized existence, one in which you are accurately measured and valued based on the best available statistics. All you have to surrender in exchange for this mathematically fine-tuned paradise is something you allegedly weren’t using anyway: your soul.
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In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “[E]ven if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.”
Fifty years after he wrote these lines, Dostoevsky’s country was taken over by social engineers who thought the human was effectively a piano key. Now, seeing the same technocratic spirit all around us, we should reflect. There are many of us who share the strong yet inarticulable feeling that the essence of a human being is spiritual. We need to have the courage to step up, meet the technocrats’ wager, and up the ante. Maybe it’s time to “do something perverse” and log off.
Sam Buntz is a writer based in Chicago. His novel The God of Smoke and Mirrors is available on Amazon.