Focus on nexuses of complexity: Transversal

Being human in the time of neuroscience and artificial intelligence involve carefully exploring the nexuses of complexity where valid ideas are nevertheless in tension, manifesting subtleties and challenges that must not be overlooked. Each page expresses the existing tension(s) between ideas and within each theme, which emerged in the collective discussions, and are then complemented by insights from NHNAI network researchers.

The global-transversal idea “Relying on technology to improve our lives” highlights the fact that AI and automation technologies could help us saving time for essential activities such as relationships or anything that fosters human flourishing by delegating tedious tasks to machines. It also pointed that AI and NS outcomes may allow us to enhance our physical and mental abilities, improving our performance and efficiency.

The global-transversal idea “Seeking for self-improvement” expresses the claim that it is a core part of human nature to seek for self-improvement and progress, for maximizing efficiency.

Nevertheless, (as the global-transversal idea “Preserving and intensifying what makes us human and fostering human flourishing” warns, it may prove destructive to seek uncritically and systematically for augmentation and improvement of efficiency and performance. It could lead to sacrifice aspects that are essential for humans, such as autonomy, creativity, relationships or to negate some limits and vulnerabilities that are at the heart of what it means to be human (mortality, affectability for instance).

Seeking self-improvement is something that does not exist as such in human behavior, if it is not attached to a goal-oriented action and in a broad temporal context (ex: we want to assure access to food and water, shelter, …). This goal carries a value for the human that motivates (or not) to further learning and development of certain capacities and behaviors.  Humans think they maximize their efficiency, but as Herbert Simon has mentioned, humans have a bounded rationality, and thus limited capacities to really maximize thought processes and thus behavior. Human rather “satisfice” their behavior in order to become as satisfied as quickly as possible, which is not the same than maximizing their capacities. This bias also applies regarding the use of technology, and with AI is strongly potentiated. Yet, as has been shown, it also reduces dramatically the learning possibilities of the person and in fine, its freedom for action in the world. So, seeking self-improvement should resonate with the possibility to increase learning (embodied) and the possibilities for future learning (keeping doors open…) instead of accelerating certain performances that further ahead deprive the human of learning and thus adapting to changing conditions (if we consider that its adaptability greatly depends on its capacity to learn new behaviors/thoughts to face new problems).

This tension could be discussed in the context of a book published in March 2024 by Editions du Cerf (Paris) entitled “L’humain au centre du monde” (subtitled “Pour un humanisme des temps présents et à venir. Contre les nouveaux obscurantismes” ).

Daniel Salvatore Schiffer sums up one of the key messages:

“In short : the insidious and gradual erosion, if not evaporation, of the human being, in all his anthropological complexity (to use a key concept in Edgar Morin’s philosophico-sociological edifice), to the benefit of a world that is all too often alienated, directive and reductive, It is a totalitarianism that ignores itself or does not speak its name, and so, in the face of increasingly Manichean thinking, it advances masked, sly and silent, but all the more dangerous for the freedom of the mind, of speech and thought, if not of conscience!”