The New York Times on being human in an Inhuman Age

The theme of The Arendt Center's upcoming conference Human Being in an Inhuman Age is also the subject of an ongoing series in The New York Times, called "Smarter Than You Think."

The first installment was a wide-eyed look at the Singularity movement, profiling Ray Kurzweil who will be speaking at the Arendt Center Conference on Friday, Oct. 22. Kurzweil will speak for an hour, followed by a discussion between Mr. Kurzweil and Bard President, Leon Botstein.

The latest entry looks at the rapid advance of speech software and artificial intelligence that allows machines to have meaningful conversations and perform tasks that require comprehension, conversation, and some level of thinking and learning.

For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence — the use of computers to simulate human thinking. But in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn, in their way. The prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines.

This raises as well the question of what the role of humans will be in the world when machines do more of the work that we have traditionally done. As Bill Joy worried in Wired, what besides altruism will lead our political leaders to keep superfluous workers alive when not only factory work but also teaching, warfare, and administration can be done by an automated workforce?

The advances, according to The Times, herald an era in which we interact with machines much as we do with friends and co-workers:

"Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines that look at them and understand them,” said Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft’s research laboratory who led the medical avatar project, one of several intended to show how people and computers may communicate before long.

The question here, as with so much in the world of artificial intelligence, is what actually distinguishes humans from machines. If it is simply the ability to think, to reason, and to calculate, the day is coming when that difference will be no difference. This requires that we ask about the soul, the heart, and the ineffable nature of humanity. And as more and more of the beings we interact with and institutions we work with are governed by computer rationality, what does it mean today to be human?

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