Whenever searching for inspiration, one place I stop is The Atlantic. Today, they had a post entitled The Humanist’s Paradox, and it instantly got my heart pumping.
I began college in the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) department of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the time, it was the #3 school in the country for ECE behind MIT and Stanford. I proceeded to work very very hard and by the end of my third semester, I was at the top of my class.
I then studied abroad in Costa Rica for a semester. I took no engineering courses, just Spanish, biotourism, Latin American film, marketing, etc. After returning home and working at Caterpillar for a summer internship, I returned to my university and took a semester to explore a different major. I did very well in the classes and enjoyed myself more. At the beginning of the next semester, I switched degrees, starting International Studies with a interdisciplinary focus on Intercultural Communications.
Computers easier to understand than humans
When people asked me why I switched, I would give many reasons, but one of them is very appropriate to the article above:
I believed that electrical engineering was easier than intercultural communications.
Why do I believe that?
Because electrical engineering has an answer. It has fewer variables. You can test whether it works in a controlled environment. You can “solve” it.
Intercultural communications? I have no way to know whether you even understand the words “intercultural communications” as I do, and I personally believe that there is zero chance that anyone in the world has the same understanding of those words as another person does, let alone knowing how to interpret the hidden meaning in a conversation with someone with whom you don’t even speak the same language.
Computers get older, humans stay the same age
Computers are advancing at an astonishing pace. From Moore’s Law to app ecosystems to APIs and open source projects, the rate at which computers are advancing is incomprehensible.
Humans, on the other hand? I’m not sure we’ve changed much over the last thousands of years. We still struggle with the same decisions that Odysseus did (and maybe perform worse than he); we still have the same beliefs about life after death as our ancestors; we still get into petty arguments about who needs to clean the dishes.
I have often felt frustrated that some of our brightest minds are using their capabilities to make computers more human instead of making humans more human. Teaching computers to see like humans, to recognize faces like humans, to feel like humans.
However, it makes sense. For someone who wants to make an impact on the world, it seems a lot easier to do that with computers than with humans. We humans often revert to our old habits, no matter how much training, which can be very frustrating. Computers, however, have gone from room-sized machines to fitting on a USB stick. The internet wasn’t really even a thing 20 years ago. Imagine. When I click publish on this post, it can be shared with the whole world in seconds. Crazy.
Making humans more human
If teaching other humans to be human is hard enough, just imagine how many mistakes we are going to make when programming computers to be human. We still don’t even know why humans sleep. Or yawn! We have fairly limited knowledge on how the stomach works, and Western medicine often seems like guesswork — “Hmm. Try this pill.”
I fear us building Artificial Intelligence not because I think computers are inherently bad, I fear it because I don’t think we know how to build a human. Yes, we raise babies, but they start with a lot of innate humanness.
Any tool can be used for good or bad, and instead of trying to build tools with more humanity, I strive to build humans with more humanity so that we use the tools more humanely.