The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger

The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know.

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.

AI will usher in a world in which decisions are made in three primary ways: by humans (which is familiar), by machines (which is becoming familiar), and by collaboration between humans and machines (which is not only unfamiliar but also unprecedented). AI is also in the process of transforming machines — which, until now, have been our tools — into our partners. We will begin to give AI fewer specific instructions about how exactly to achieve the goals we assign it.

As societies develop their own human-machine partnerships — with varying goals, different training models, and potentially incompatible operational and moral limits with respect to AI — they may devolve into rivalry, technical incompatibility, and ever greater mutual incomprehension.

Once AI’s performance outstrips that of humans for a given task, failing to apply that AI, at least as an adjunct to human efforts, may appear increasingly as perverse or even negligent.

A novel human-machine partnership is emerging: First, humans define a problem or a goal for a machine. Then a machine, operating in a realm just beyond human reach, determines the optimal process to pursue. Once a machine has brought a process into the human realm, we can try to study it, understand it, and, ideally, incorporate it into existing practice.

That current human-machine partnership requires both a definable problem and a measurable goal is reason not to fear all-knowing, all-controlling machines; such inventions remain the stuff of science fiction. Yet human-machine partnerships mark a profound departure from previous experience.