The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger

The outcome will be the alteration of human identity and the human experience of reality at levels not experienced since the dawn of the modern age.

What, then, will it mean to be human?

This book seeks to provide the reader with a template with which they can decide for themselves what that future should be. Humans still control it. We must shape it with our values.

These early programs’ chief advantage against human opponents was not originality but superior processing power, enabling them to evaluate far more options in a given period of time. By contrast, AlphaZero had no preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play. AlphaZero’s style was entirely the product of AI training: creators supplied it with the rules of chess, instructing it to develop a strategy to maximize its proportion of wins to losses. After training for just four hours by playing against itself, AlphaZero emerged as the world’s most effective chess program. As of this writing, no human has ever beaten it.

Even after the antibiotic was discovered, humans could not articulate precisely why it worked. The AI did not just process data more quickly than humanly possible; it also detected aspects of reality humans have not detected, or perhaps cannot detect.

In some cases, it obtained results that were beyond the capacity of human minds—at least minds operating in practical time frames—to calculate. In other cases, it obtained results by methods that humans could, retrospectively, study and understand. In others, humans remain uncertain to this day how the programs achieved their goals.

Yet as with all technologies, AI is not only about its capabilities and promise but also about how it is used.

Attempts to halt its development will merely cede the future to the element of humanity courageous enough to face the implications of its own inventiveness.

How will AI’s evolution affect human perception, cognition, and interaction? What will AI’s impact be on our culture, our concept of humanity, and, in the end, our history?

Only very rarely have we encountered a technology that challenged our prevailing modes of explaining and ordering the world. But AI promises to transform all realms of human experience. And the core of its transformations will ultimately occur at the philosophical level, transforming how humans understand reality and our role within it.

If AI “thinks,” or approximates thinking, who are we?

Scientific revolutions, especially in the twentieth century, have evolved technology and philosophy, but the central Enlightenment premise of a knowable world being unearthed, step-by-step, by human minds has persisted. Until now.

We would be better served by recognizing that AI is already all around us—often in ways that are not entirely evident—and redirecting our technological anxieties toward encouraging greater understanding of and transparency regarding AI’s integration into our lives.