AI World Summit 2022 Dr Iain McGilchrist on Artificial Intelligence and The Matter with Things

foreign to be or not to be that I have it on the authority of a member of the Danish royal family is the question but not the only one some others of these what is life for who are we anyway and what are we doing here in my recent book the matter with things I do my best to address these very questions and try to set up why we're getting things so badly wrong I'm not just here referring to our heinous crimes such as poisoning the Earth's oceans destroying its forests and persecuting its indigenous peoples fighting Wars and enslaving people in the pursuit of rare Earths melting the ice caps and bringing to Extinction rare and beautiful species of living things fading the glories of the world these are visible but less visible perhaps is that we're making ourselves wretched there are no two ways about it we are more affluent than ever but riches and power the only point in having riches do not make people happier ask a psychiatrist or take a look at the face of Vladimir Putin with power alas of life and death over millions of people and the owner of the most expensive lavatory paper dispenser in the world no affluent as we are we are also more anxious depressed lonely isolated and lacking in purpose than we have ever been the effect is of Staggering size and the evidence is clear it can be shown to have little to do with diagnostic fashion so why is this I suggest it is because we have no longer the foggiest idea what a human life is about indeed there's a sense in which we no longer live in a world at all but exist in a simulacrum of our own making you expect me to speak of brains and I will not disappoint you leaving new horse aside and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase we are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of our brain the reasons of survival one hemisphere of the brain the left has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation grabbing getting and controlling well the other the right has effectively been given so charge of the task of understanding the whole picture so conflicting of these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered one from the other our apparent ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere does not depend on the brain itself having radically changed in the last couple of centuries though it is certainly always evolving it's more like this you buy a radio set and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to for a host of reasons after a while you end up listening only to one it's not the radio set that's changed it's you and in the case of the brain it would not even have mattered so much if we'd settled on the intelligent Channel but we didn't we settled on the one whose value is nothing to do with truth nor with courage magnetivity and generosity but only greed grabbing and getting manipulation and know the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked that itself is a myth that requires debunking in which I've been rather successfully debunking for some while now what definitely does need to be debunked is the bad old pop psychology story that the left hemisphere does reason and language and maybe a bit dull but is at least reliable like a slightly boring accountant and the right hemisphere does emotions and pictures but is apt to be flighty and fair all this is wrong since we now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that for the record the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable as well as less intelligent and I mean cognitively as well as emotionally and socially than the right the right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent grosser and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere then to the left without the right hemisphere to rely on the left hemisphere as at sea it quite literally denies the most obvious facts lies and makes stuff up and it doesn't know what it's talking about and it is relentlessly vacuously cheerful in the face of overwhelming disaster you may well say but so what why the first actually I don't care where things go on in my brain but it does matter hugely because each hemisphere takes a different view of the world and those views are not strictly compatible and so when we reflect philosophize or discourse publicly we're pretty much forced without knowing to favor one tape or the other it seems that for us to be of two minds to appear inconsistent is a greater sin than to be consistently wrong no room for yes but for news for seeing the hidden opposite that is always there in whatever is being peddled to us so what are these two hemispheric visions of the world like I hope you may recognize them from experience the left using narrow beam scattered attention to one detail after another to use what is already familiar certain static explicit abstract decontextualized disembodied categorized General in nature and reduced to its parts all is predictable and controlled this is an inanimate universe and a bureaucrat's dream it is like a map in relation to the world is mapped useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out and its only value is utility note that all here is a re-presentation which literally means present again when it's actually no longer present but Dead and Gone the other the right hemisphere sees not the representation but the living presence bringing broad open sustained Vigilant attention to bear on the world it sees what is fresh unique never fully known never finally certain but full of potential it understands all it is and must remain implicit humor poetry art narrative music The Sacred indeed everything we love it understands that nothing is ever merely static and unchanging but flowing and radically interconnected that parts of the left hemisphere's invention and that what we are seeing as parts are already hoes at another level this is a free world an animate universe and a bureaucrat's nightmare it has all the richness and unfathomable complexity of the world that the left hemisphere simply mapped these two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival we need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things to deal with the necessities of life and to build the foundations of a civilization but to live in it we also need to belong to the living world and to understand the complexity of what it is we're dealing with this division of attention Works to our advantage when we use both however it is a handicap in fact it is a catastrophe when we use only one as I explained in the master and his hemisphere twice in the history of the West in ancient Greece and then in Rome a civilization started out with an extraordinarily fruitful Harmony of left and right but as it overreached itself it moved ever further towards the left hemisphere's Take On The World before collapsing and the same trajectory is now being pursued for the third time after the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the Arts science society and philosophy that we call the Renaissance our civilization has moved since the enlightenment drunk with the Arrogant beliefs that it knows everything and can fix everything further and further towards the left we are now like Sleepwalkers whistling a Happy tune as we amble towards the abyss there is a phenomenon in Psychology called the dunning-kruger effect which means that the less you know the more you think you know and vice versa the left hemisphere doesn't know what it is it doesn't know and so it thinks it knows everything the right hemisphere which in reality understands far more is aware of those vast unknowns when we're functioning well the right hemisphere tests the left hemisphere's theory about reality against experience but the left hemisphere's vision of a lifeless mechanical two-dimensional geometric construct has been externalized around us to such an extent that when the right hemisphere checks back with experience it finds the left hemisphere has already colonized our reality at least for those of us who lead a modern Western urban life it finds a perfect simulacrum of the world according to the left hemisphere the things that used to give us a clue that our reductionist theorists weren't all they were cracked up to be are fading away for most of us these were the proximity of the natural world the sense of a coherent shared culture of the body of something we live not merely possess the soul-moving power of great art and the sense of something sacred that is very real but beyond everyday language turning to AI artificial information processing by the way not artificial intelligence in many ways it could be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe since the evolutionary reason for developing left hemisphere functions was solely to enhance power this could indeed be seen as the ultimate logical aim of the left hemisphere it has after all no sense of the bigger picture of other values or of the way in which context and even sheer scale and extent changes everything every Angel has his devil what looks good in one context may be far from good in another or when extended too far but every devil has his angel and full credit to AI where it has potential to be an enormous help to us above all I believe this is in finding ways to help reverse the Damage Done by the tide of Destruction that industrialization itself has brought about the destruction of the Living World which I started by referring to ecological repair here it can be truly a good Angel the very best we could hope for and as much else to be grateful for it can help treat diseases and perhaps find less destructive ways such as nuclear fusion to generate power as an aside though maybe our dependency on power is part of the problem and we should be aiming to use far less power in the future and though as a doctor I believe in treating diseases you'll be surprised Here length of life is not by a million miles as important as the quality of that life and we will all die of something one day we must focus on quality not quantity of life here again I believe AI could help us but how I suspect by dealing with the sort of technical problems I've mentioned and keeping as far as possible out of our daily lives let me explain can't AI help us through freeing time up for us by removing mundane tasks of course I.T saves Time by doing things quickly or does it bosses become rich by Saving wages but we become their new unwilling wage slaves this is already apparent in not so small ways that add cumulatively cumulatively to the stress of everyday life and Rob it of its feel of connection with another human being as well as robbing us of our most precious commodity time this has got more obvious in the last four or five years so not just because of covid though that accelerated an already obvious development as more and more processes that used to take a five-minute phone call become automated we find ourselves entering into Commerce with a computer program for several diverting hours leading us into inescapable escher-like closed loops and then reporting playfully oops something went wrong and if after this you hold the phone for an hour says speak to a real person they increasingly appear to have been so degraded by enforcement and machine-like algorithms that they might as well be machined everyday life has got much worse as machines gradually displace humans what happens to human flourishing what happens when Reliance on machines strips us of our skills a process already well advanced and especially what happens if any number of reasons such as shortages of what we call resources extended power failures the breakdown of civil order or War or just the unsustainability of present levels of growth across whole populations we can no longer always have those machines to rely on how resilient resourceful skillful will we then turn out to be compared with our forebears leaving aside such alarming but not I think merely Allah missed possibilities what about the impact on us of the loss of daily contact with human beings there's more and more jobs become automated what happens to those who are rendered there by unemployed yes a few lucky clever ones may get jobs in I.T but the economic Drive is very simple machines are cheaper than people so the aim has to be to employ fewer people doesn't it and what about our dignity as free individuals thanks to AI can we escape the appalling Prospect already realized in China that wherever we go whatever we buy whomever we're seen with are every word every action the very thoughts we Express in our faces all is monitored potentially marked down against us and whatever freedom is still left to us parameterally curtailed accordingly we become unpeople non-citizens non-humans the only answer to this seems to be a kind of AI arms race in which the supposed good is uh use AI to head off the AI of the baddies but even if this could happen and I can't see how but then I'm not an AI expert how do we know who are the goodies anymore the wef the problem with every step that increases the reach of human power as it will sooner or later be used for evil ends and once a pernicious regimes a a reaches a certain level it can effectively destroy any attempt to resist it bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism which can have no end all decisions affecting humans are moral ones and as I've argued that length morality is not purely utilitarian and cannot be reduced to calculation every human situation is actually unique and uniqueness has to do with personal history Consciousness memory intention all that is not explicit that we refer to in that deceptively simple word emotion all the experience and understanding gained through and stored in the body all that makes us specificity humans not machines goodness stems from virtuous Minds not following rules well machines also it is claimed to get more like humans humans are getting more like machines AI is there to make things happen to give us control but this is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how otherwise it's like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers by the way if you spot evidence of a comparable growth in wisdom do send my PA a postcard won't you it's worth pointing out that subjects with schizophrenia whose thinking and behavior are like those with left hemisphere overdrive and hypo function of the right hemisphere so your world made up of bits and pieces and often imagined people to become inanimate and machine-like or zombies to them nothing seems real anymore just a simulacrum a pretense a play put on to deceive them a person may look like a person but uncannually isn't just a i and to me the belief that machines could become sentient is really just the obverse phase of the view that we sentient beings are really just machines the psychiatrist Rd Lang reported a schizoid patient who saw his wife as a mechanism she was an ID because everything she did was a predictable determined response he would for instance tell her it an ordinary funny joke and when she it laughed this indicated her it's entirely conditioned robot-like nature in its Assumption of determinacy and empty mechanistic Behavior this reflects what is hardly even a parody of a certain not uncommon scientific position it also represents a chilling psychopathology as to cyborgs the best way to destroy Humanity would be to hybridize it with a machine I do not call those who pursue this aim evil they may just have a failure of imagination but the aim itself is evil if we can call anything evil it can only further degrade our idea of what a human life is for and it obviously opens us to totalitarian control which Knows No Limit it seems to me that we're like The sorcer's Apprentice in the story who knew the spell that would set things in motion but had no idea how to make it stop obviously the genie is out of the bottle and cannot now be put back unless by a breakdown of civilization which is I'm afraid far from unlikely so what can we hope for the future what matters for the future of humanity is imagination and the values by which we allow ourselves to be led the left hemisphere can often be an impediment to imagination and its value is single and simple power this is intellectually morally and spiritually bankrupt so can AI further the workings of the right hemisphere not I think directly because it's far from being a matter of different processing say parallel rather than serial but it can by choosing its projects very carefully and positively turning away from those that will harm your choices are moral act you can't shrug it off I've painted some dark pictures but in the situation that we're in right now while we have time can we do something oddly the Paradox is that to succeed at AI whose entire purpose is to give us control you must let go of control at least to a large extent let go of mechanisms bureaucracy micromanagement and strangulation by systems we must work with not against nature a gardener cannot make a plant or make it grow a gardener can only permit and encourage the plant itself to do what it does or crowd it out and stifle its chances to thrive humans in this respect are like plants we can only be more or less impeded in our Grace by external pressures we need spontaneity openness to risk and Trust in our intuition for an imagination and creativity and for us to be alive and truly present so I say find people with a proven record of intelligence and above all Insight then give them time stop breathing down their necks stop asking how many papers they've published recently or how near they are to a patentable product it is true that if you trust sometimes you will be let down but more often in this Arena you will be handsomely rewarded whereas if you Monitor and control you will never get more than mediocrity and we cannot afford mediocrity right now if we are not to become ever more diminished as humans we need people to be in control of machines not them in control of us I'm not talking here about an apocalypocalyptic future and talking about Apocalypse Now we're already calmly and quietly surrendering our Liberty our privacy our dignity our time our values and our talents to the machine machines will serve us well if they truly relieve us from drudgery but we must leave human Affairs to humans if not we sign our own death warrant all that we value most cannot be achieved by control or by an effort of will many rationally desirable goals such as sleep are simply incompatible with the State of Mind required to pursue them they must come if they come at all as the byproduct of a life well lived among these our wisdom itself followed closely by imagination creativity courage humility virtue love sympathy admiration faith and understanding they cannot be willed what makes life worth living is what can only be described as a resonance an encounter with other living beings with the natural world and with the greatest products of the human soul some would say with the cosmos at Large it's only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world and come Fully Alive the Resonance of a real relationship with a truly sentient other is not possible where there is no Freedom no spontaneity no life there is a mighty challenge then ahead one in which your decisions and responses my friends will be of the utmost importance so I shall leave you with a question an important question which is one that every human needs to answer to be or not to be that is in fact the question thank you [Applause] wow

Channel: Dr Iain McGilchrist

Views: 18,886

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Id: XgbUCKWCMPA

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022

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[u/waddums]

Pretty good condensed intro to his ideas. Hope everyone is out there doing whatever puts you in the flow of being

[u/[deleted]]

As a lifelong acolyte of Iain's, I actually wasn't a huge fan of this particular speech. AI is an interesting field that has enormous implications for the future - and Iain's skepticism of AI feels a bit over-conservative. I believe it is possible to approach AI from a right-hemispheric point of view, but exactly how is not obvious to me. It's a very difficult thing to discuss, and for someone of Iain's stature and knowledge, I know he does not want to make any hypothetical leaps that would potentially undermine his credibility. If I were him I wouldn't have done this speech to this crowd.