Modern Masochism: the Exquisite Pain of AI Ethics

We fear AI, and yet we create it. So, what does our love-hate relationship with human ingenuity reveal? The answer, though uncomfortable, is simple. Our self-esteem is low. Learn the elusive code of self-compassion and you’ll see what AI’s actually doing: writing a love letter to humanity. 

The Fabled Fetish

One day, a superintelligent machine capable of surpassing the limitations of the human mind will be created. On this day, often referred to as singularity, everything will change. Our role as sovereign humans, stewards of the earth, will be passed on to a computer. Dethroned from our positions of authority, decisions ranging from who lives and who dies to who eats and who starves, who prospers and who withers, will no longer be ours.

At least, that’s how the story’s developing.

This story doesn’t come from logic, science, or evidence. It comes from fear. At seemingly every turn, once unthinkable technical breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, 5G, gene editing, driverless cars, drones, and protein folding now challenge life as we know it. The speed of change is faster than our ability to process what’s really unfolding. We struggle to see the wood for the trees. Scared that a technological intelligence will rise and dominate, we declare a race against time to save humanity. 

Defeated and dejected, to save us from *ourselves* the products, AI ethics teams, consultants, and courses emerge. With urgency, they ferociously debate unanswerable questions on the meaning of life, believing in their unique abilities to finally create safeguards to peace, equality and freedom. Unsurprisingly, AI ethics as a concept has largely failed. Most teams have proven useless, been disbanded, or become surrounded by controversy. 

Delirious with anxiety, we panic even more, thinking that failure must be a signal of unethical behavior, that we’re one step closer to being dominated by evil. But it isn’t. It’s a neon sign that there’s a flaw in our logic.

And it’s a big one. 

Underneath the modern debate is an unsaid argument we buy into but are too scared to say out loud. Here’s the implicit logic: since humans have made a mess of this world, we must be incapable of fixing it, and so we must create and surrender to a higher power. 

In psychological terms, this is a sign of mental illness. The narrative arc behind the AI singularity debate is a story as old as time. You’re unworthy, and so you must surrender. We’ve come a long way technologically, but psychologically, we’re incredibly primitive. We fall into the same cult-like traps that limit us, rather than free us.

That’s why the conversation around AI isn’t rational, it’s hysterical. In the whirlwind, we haven’t had a chance to catch our breath and realize that we’re chasing our own tails. It’s time to change that. Our current understanding of superintelligence isn’t liberation. 

It’s a domination fetish. 

There is no machine in or close to existence that can command all of us, and there is no tangible evidence that such could be created. Instead, the very real existential threat facing humanity is that we die hapless victims of our own distorted imagination.

AI Doesn’t Have an Ethics Problem. AI Reveals a Self-Esteem Problem.

AI isn’t a being, so it can’t be ethical or unethical. It’s a tool, application, product. The worse the product, the worse the people who are behind it. We needn't engage in endless debate about the hypothetical possibilities of ethics, a field with enough variety to argue that almost anything is virtuous. Instead, we need to talk about the actual problem... 

The self-esteem of AI creators and admirers. 

An unethical system comes from an unethical person. Unethical, neuronormative character comes from someone with low self-esteem. Low self-esteem inhabits those who believe they’re unloveable. Claiming product accuracy when the dataset is knowingly limited, and working on a superintelligent machine that has the potential to choose to destroy us articulates a problem not with technology, but with us. It shows that we have given up and have bet against ourselves. 

It’s not noble or powerful; it’s masochistic. It’s a sign of low self worth. 

It’s time to talk about that.

Betting against oneself isn’t rational; it’s emotional. Whether it’s fixing the hole in the ozone layer, overcoming the plague or beating out the Nazis, humanity always finds a way to fix the problem. In fact, the only evidence we have is that we can overcome even the most heinous challenges. 

We will overcome climate change, we will reduce inequality, we will end the refugee crisis. But, there’s a caveat: the only way to do this is to recognize the power of human ingenuity. It’s us. We are the saviors we’ve been seeking. Our own ingenuity is the secret to building a future we can be proud of. Afterall, our own ingenuity is what built AI in the first place.

History is cyclical and at this stage, nothing is a surprise. We go through cycles of despair and hope. That’s why there’s one rational tell-tell sign that will show us when we’re close to superintelligence actually being created, one that can only be seen outside the realm of insecurity. 

One that no one has noticed. 

Intelligence Matures to Identify One Consistent Solution

We’ll know we’re close to building superintelligence when systems start pointing to one answer - love. 

Real love. It’s better than a romantic love: it’s a love of ourselves. A love of life. A love of the world. A love we’re so disconnected with, most of us struggle to imagine it.

Yet, what may read as an adorable naivety is a statistical reality. Through the dataset of human development, there’s only one consistent pattern that emerges: life is all about love. Whether it’s religion, sociology or economics, each theory reaches the same conclusion: we only work properly when we love. 

Jesus’ golden rule – love your neighbor as you love yourself; Buddha’s core teaching – don’t hurt others with what pains you; Prophet Mohammed’s central lesson – love your brother as you love for yourself; Durkheim’s core sociological theory – interconnectivity makes society prosper; Jung’s collective unconscious theory – the way we treat others impacts our psychology; Adam Smith’s central economic theory – aspiration and sharing with others creates wealth of nations. 

They all send the same message.

We argue about the value of one theory over another, assessing which one is more worthy. We trade religion for sociology for economics for AI, all the while hiding behind ever increasing complexity. We do this in the name of intelligence, but really it’s in the name of fear. In truth, every long standing idea that has fundamentally changed society merges into one simple theory: that of reciprocity. 

What we give out to the world comes back to us. 

If we want to receive love, we must give love. What it takes to make the world prosper isn’t mystical, undefinable or unknown; it’s glaringly obvious. If built, superintelligence will tell us the same thing that every major form of intelligence has already told us: 

Prosperity = Reciprocity = Love

What’s Simple is Never Easy

Yes, life just isn’t that complicated. World peace really is a formula away.

There is no food shortage, there is no distribution challenge, there is no lack of wealth and there is no climate crisis. Today, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone, enough money to eliminate poverty, enough infrastructure to maintain prosperity, and enough seeds and land to plant the trees needed to remove carbon. What we lack is an antidote to the fear of achieving our hopes and dreams. 

What we lack is love. 

Do we love ourselves enough to love each other well?

The root of all our problems - war, famine, genocide, corruption, the very worst of humanity – comes from humans acting out of fear, not love. 

That’s it. 

We make the same mistakes again and again because of one significant oversight: not everyone believes they deserve love. Many treat themselves terribly. From eating food that isn’t nourishing, to spending money that doesn’t exist, to people pleasing for attention, actions of unworthiness are abundant. And, who can blame them? We’ve created a world that feasts on self-denial. 

Whether it’s the media, racism, sexism or algorithms, our entire economy trades on fear. That’s why the average child will learn to suppress their natural instinct for love and view the world as a fearful place by the time they’ve turned just 12 years old.  Our natural code is overwritten to support the transactional economy.

With over ten thousand words in the English language to describe love, we’re surprised why none explain that we must express it to thrive. We forget that there are also over a thousand words to describe water and none explain that we must drink it to survive. Intuition, not language, teaches us what’s vital. 

We all know what love really is, we just pretend not to.

Love may be simple, but it’s alien. 

Grieve the Loss of an Artificial Saviour to Experience the Revelation of True Superintelligence

The debate on whether AI will harm us or save us is emotional. It soothes us from the pain of reality. Because, in reality, no one’s coming. 

We’ve been told a lie.

There is no AI powered robot coming to save us, there is nothing we can buy to protect ourselves, and there is no one we can vote in to solve the problems of our time. Whether we colonize Mars, or relocate to the Metaverse, it doesn’t matter. We can’t escape our problems if we continue to escape ourselves.

It’s just us.

How utterly painful. 

We hurt ourselves with AI because it’s less painful than accepting the ostrazing truth: that the structures around us are wrong. That we’ve been misled. We escape the present moment, and the obvious, as a means to escape the most painful of all realities: that it’s time to stand up against our own. But, it is time.

Grieve the outrage of this disappointment, and something unexpected occurs. An answer is revealed. Progress comes from changing the humans who create society, not society itself. And so, to positively transform reality, there’s only one problem we need to solve:

How do we move humans from fear to love?

Our world needs superintelligence for reasons not yet imagined. If built, superintelligence will emerge as the tool that teaches us how to move from fear to love. It will accomplish the unthinkable. It will teach us how to save ourselves. 

We can advance AI by decades, if not centuries, by being brave enough to start solving this problem now. We can fundamentally transform our planet and improve the lives of billions by being brave enough to start solving this now.

Embracing love will take a new ecosystem of creators, developers and storytellers to come together in surprising ways. At Aestora, we’re designing AI applications that can move humans from fear to love. When the time is right, we’ll share more publicly. Today, we’re asking anyone that might have a piece of this mystery, wants to get involved, or who's just excited by what they’ve read, to get in touch here. 

AI is writing a love letter to humanity; it’s time to decode it. 

Stephanie Antonian

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