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A visitor takes a picture with his mobile phone of an image designed with artificial intelligence by Berlin-based digital creator Julian van Dieken inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring” at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague on March 9. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Weijian Shan
Weijian Shan

The edge humans have over AI? Use your imagination

  • Recent advances in artificial intelligence have sparked fears that the machines may one day take over
  • What distinguishes human beings from AI is consciousness of the kind that leads to independent and creative thinking
Weijian Shan
Weijian Shan
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Recent advances in artificial intelligence raise the question of whether it will eventually replace and surpass human intelligence.

A decade ago physicist Stephen Hawking said he feared thinking machines would evolve faster than humans, bound as we are by our biological limits, and eventually take on a life of their own, potentially spelling the end of the human race.

Can machines become intelligent and powerful enough to turn against their makers, as they did the film The Matrix?

The answer is no, because machines cannot acquire the “consciousness” – the awareness of one’s own existence, thoughts, feelings, sensations and surroundings – that would inspire such a revolt.

Consciousness can be seen as a gift from God, granted only to humans. Scientifically speaking, consciousness evolved from the primordial need to survive and reproduce, which gave rise to the “desire” and “intentions” that drive behaviour and set objectives. An AI machine will not evolve to set objectives on its own, because without these primordial needs it cannot acquire consciousness or free will.

AI is able to discover patterns in huge quantities of data far better than humans. But it can only do so for an objective defined by a human being. A computer can beat a human in a game of chess whose objective and rules have already been set by a human being, but it cannot change the objective or the rules.

Why does this matter? Without consciousness, desire, intent and the ability to set goals, AI, no matter how powerful, will be incapable of the independent, creative and critical thinking necessary to come up with new ideas – the ability to theorise, hypothesise, postulate or imagine with limited or no information, before such ideas can be tested or proven by data, observations or experiments. Imagination is only human.

Imagine there had been an AI that incorporated all the knowledge available at the time of Christopher Columbus. Would it have been able to introduce Europeans to the “New World”? No, because there was no information about the New World or about a westward route to India. Finding that route required having a new idea, a theory, a purpose, free will and a desire – which can only come from a human mind.

Albert Einstein pondered the theories of relativity through visualised thought experiments, long before they were proven. At the age of 16, he imagined himself chasing a beam of light at the same speed and hit upon the paradox that whereas he would observe the beam to be at a standstill – just as the seats in an aeroplane do not move relative to its passengers – someone on the Earth would see it travelling at the velocity of light.

Of course, he needed all the contemporary knowledge of physics and mathematics, which he acquired later in life, to develop his theories. But his ability to imagine things from nothing can only be a human endeavour.

Consider another human trait – deception. Humans lie, sometimes for good purposes, but often for bad ones. “Operation Mincemeat” was a deception the British cooked up during World War II to misdirect Hitler’s forces away from the Allied invasion of Sicily. Bernard Madoff cheated his investors and enriched himself with a Ponzi scheme. Can you imagine AI lying or cheating unless a human being directs it to do so?

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Humanoid machines read faces, emotions at World Robot Conference in Beijing

Humanoid machines read faces, emotions at World Robot Conference in Beijing

AI cannot be a philosopher or spiritual leader because machines cannot be made capable of abstract thinking or of inspiration. Without these qualities, there would be no Aristotle, Buddha or Martin Luther, all of whom produced profound insights into the nature of the universe and the human condition.

Nor can AI conduct business negotiations whose outcome cannot be predefined. My new book, Money Machine, tells the story of multiparty negotiations for a history-making deal whose outcome could have been any of the infinite possibilities, none of which was optimal for any party.

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It is consciousness that ultimately defines the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence. Consciousness leads to independent and creative thinking that produces novel ideas, such as those of Isaac Newton, Plato and Confucius.

This is not to downplay the significance of AI. It will increasingly be a powerful instrument that help humans achieve their objectives. But it will remain just that, as have all tools since the dawn of human consciousness.

Weijian Shan is the author of Out of the Gobi, Money Games, and Money Machine, a trustee of the British Museum and executive chairman of PAG

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