The End of Purpose: How AI Is Making Us Rethink What It Means to Be Human #47 #cong22

Synopsis:

In recent years, AI has been increasingly presented as a threatening technology, with doomsayers talking about how it will destroy jobs, and make us obsolete. One of the key ways in which AI is said to be making us obsolete is by taking away our purpose. Once machines can do everything we can do, and do it better, faster and cheaper, what will be left for us to do? What will be our purpose?

Total Words

999

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. The idea that we need to have a purpose is relatively recent
  2. The view that our worth as human beings is somehow tied up in what we do is a product of the Enlightenment
  3. AI is making us rethink what it means to be human
  4. AI is not making us obsolete, it is making us rethink our purpose

About Stephen Howell:

Stephen Howell is a geek dad of 4 neurodiverse kids. He is an advocate for ADHD and ASD awareness. Career wise, he is public speaker on cloud technologies. He has worked for companies like IBM, DCU, TU Dublin, and Microsoft. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on Inclusive Design & Creative Technology Innovation.

Contacting Stephen Howell:

You can contact Stephen by email.

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By Stephen Howell

I sat the Leaving Certificate in 1994, and while I had a career guidance councillor in the school, I don’t recall ever discussing, or thinking about the future in terms of purpose. Instead, we focused not on what course at university we might enjoy but what course would lead to a profession with jobs. As a child of the 80’s, future employment prospects were paramount. Woe betide the student who studied something just because they were good at it, or thought they might like it.

I have never been a planner, or someone who envisioned a particular future. I was good at coding, albeit self-taught, and I set up a computer club, so it was not unreasonable that I would study computer science. I did not think coding or a career in tech was my purpose. I took a parttime job teaching coding to first year students in Ballymun Comprehensive. I did not think teaching was my purpose. I just went along with whatever opportunity presented itself.

Coding and teaching ended up being all I’ve really done professionally since 1994. I graduated in 1998, went into a series of coding jobs. Then I started lecturing on coding, part time at first and eventually fulltime, and at no point did I think ‘this is my purpose, I am meant to code, or teach, and ideally teach coding’.

I just did what I enjoyed, and what I was good at. If there was a steady stream of interesting work, I would do it. I never worried that I would never find my purpose, or that my lack of purpose would somehow make me less human.

In recent years, AI has been increasingly presented as a threatening technology, with doomsayers talking about how it will destroy jobs, and make us obsolete. One of the key ways in which AI is said to be making us obsolete is by taking away our purpose. Once machines can do everything we can do, and do it better, faster and cheaper, what will be left for us to do? What will be our purpose?

The funny thing is, I’ve never worried about AI taking away my purpose. I don’t think of coding, or teaching, as my purpose. They are just things I enjoy doing, and am good at. If AI can do those things better than me, then so be it. I’ll find something else to do.

The idea that we need to have a purpose, that our worth as human beings is somehow tied up in what we do, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is only in the last few hundred years that we have started to think of ourselves as beings with a specific purpose.

The ancient Greeks did not think of themselves as having a purpose. They thought of themselves as part of a larger whole, of being a small piece in the puzzle of the cosmos. The medieval Christians did not think of themselves as having a purpose. They thought of themselves as part of God’s plan, which might be unknowable to them. It was only with the rise of the Enlightenment, and the individualism that came with it, that the idea of the individual with a specific purpose began to take hold.

The Enlightenment view of the world was that it was knowable, and that humans could understand it if they used their reason. This view led to the belief that humans could, and should, control their own destiny. If the world was knowable, and if humans could understand it, then surely they could find a way to make it better.

This view of the world led to the belief that humans should have a specific purpose. We should not just drift through life, going with the flow, but should have a plan, a goal, a reason for being.

This view of the world has led to a lot of good. It has led to the development of science, and the belief that we can understand and control the world we live in. It has led to the belief that we can make the world a better place.

But it has also led to a lot of bad. It has led to the belief that those who do not have a specific purpose are somehow inferior, that they are not fully human. It has led to the belief that our worth as human beings is somehow tied up in what we do.

AI is making us rethink what it means to be human. It is making us rethink our purpose. AI is not making us obsolete. It is making us rethink what it means to be human.

Idea or Execution #79 #cong18

Synopsis:

Coming soon.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Coming soon

About Stephen Howell:

Stephen Howell is the Academic Program Manager for Microsoft Ireland. Stephen is a passionate advocate of CoderDojo and Computational Thinking both in and outside the classroom. He developed Kinect 2 Scratch and is a PhD candidate in SMARTLab, UCD on Computational Thinking education with kinaesthetic learning. Before joining Microsoft he was a software engineer and Computing lecturer on software development education and games based learning. He is dad of 4, a dedicated geek, an Aspie & ADHD dad, and a Breaker of Things.

Contacting Stephen Howell:

You can follow Stephen on Twitter or send him an email.

By Stephen Howell

I help host and organise student hackathons, events where groups work in teams to build and present something new in a day, or weekend. Once the domain of engineers and computer scientists, increasingly hackathons are open to students of all disciplines. Teams have become a blend of engineering, business, and arts majors. Generally, this is a good thing. Students should be exposed to ‘other’ disciplines and learn the value of different skills and working with people they aren’t already friends with.

The hardest part of hosting a hackathon is when the group doesn’t work. The student who can code offers to build the entry. The artistic student is sketching the UI. The marketing student is ready to polish up a presentation on the finished work. And then there’s the student, who could be of any discipline, who thinks they won’t need to actually doanything – they are the ‘ideas’ person.

Ideas in a hackathon are rarely the deciding factor in a successful entry. The learning process of building, presenting, and striving to finish in a constrained time are key. Students who think that what they have to offer is idea generation, and not implementation or illumination, are often disappointed when they realise that their contribution was quite small to the team’s overall success.

Hackathons can be a muddy reflection of a real start-up; the start-up I was most closely involved with had the ‘idea’ coalesce over a pregnancy, but the hard work and success took much longer than 9 months. The idea was so simple it could be summarised in a sentence, the creation of a successful company to implement it, a hefty tome.

The same bias as to the value of an ‘idea’ to a successful hackathon or start-up is evident when speaking to judges and investors. Those of an engineering background critique implementation. The business folk are excited by the idea, even if the implementation is incomplete, non-existent or occasionally, against the laws of known physics. This is not to say that ideas have no value, but to highlight the angles at which differently experienced folk look at the same idea & implementation.

The most humbling aspect of reflecting on one’s own history of ideas must not be the good ideas you had and how you executed them, but what other people did with them. History abounds with accidental inventions that the creator ignored because it wasn’t what they had set out to do, only for someone else to recognise the value of their idea, albeit for a different purpose. While I haven’t had any world changing ideas yet, a similar experience for me was publishing some software, for free, for teaching kids how to code by making games you could play using your body. At least, that’s what I thought it would be used for. Instead, medical researchers in Taiwan used the software to treat children with cerebral palsy by turning their boring exercise regime into a stretching game. Chinese special needs assistants used the software to teach autistic children how to safely cross the road. An Italian retirement home made simple games for the residents that they could play from their armchairs. I didn’t have any of those great ideas, but I enabled them by creating the software. My one small idea implemented adequately allowed diverse and fascinating ideas to grow, even though they weren’t in my discipline or previous experience. Perhaps executing well on one small idea, and becoming a platform for bigger and stranger ideas, is enough for this engineer.