We Are All Artificial Intelligences

A late-afternoon realization on human identity in the age of thinking machines

Wendelin Jacober, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Living Dark reader,

I have been reflecting on and mulling over the subject of artificial intelligence for quite some time now. Something I haven’t previously mentioned to you is that, adjacent to both this newsletter and my writing career, in my other guise as a college vice president and chief academic officer, I have somehow become the point person for all things AI at my institution. I’m the one leading the charge to figure out how we can and should respond to the dramatic rise of this new technology, which has become, in the blink of a cultural eye, something to which a response is required. My role in this regard includes facilitating the framing of our institutional posture toward AI while developing an understanding of how—if at all—we may integrate it responsibly and intelligently into operations both academic and administrative.

In this capacity, yesterday I found myself typing the following to a colleague in a late-afternoon email. I was writing in a kind of rush—not the hurried kind, but the kind you get into when you’re in drafting mode and are deliberately not stopping to edit along the way. The kind of writerly rush that spills thoughts and impressions onto the page before the critical mind with its valid editorial function has the chance to get out of order and quash or short-circuit the creative mind’s articulation of honest First Thoughts. So it wasn’t until I wrote the final sentence of my missive and then scanned back over the several paragraphs that had magically written themselves that I arrived at the passage below, which I read as if seeing it for the first time. The feeling was, “Wait—what?”

I share that passage here, with you, for whatever it’s worth. Maybe what I really think about AI, at least at this moment, not only in relation to higher education but in relation to human existence (or non-existence, as the case may be), has accidentally stated itself through my unwitting fingers:

I’ve been paying close attention since the first reports of this new age of artificial intelligence began circulating three or four years ago. There’s an inherent fascination to the whole thing, so when I sort of inadvertently became our point person for thinking about all of this — and writing our policy on it, and writing our HLC Quality Initiative around it, and so on — this had me following a thread of interest that was already there.

Maybe the only thing that has changed in my opinion on the use of AI in education has to do with my understanding of human intelligence, and of humanhood itself. We are all, in a very real way, artificial intelligences. Our real identity is covered over by a skein of language that more or less self-generates and propels itself according to algorithmic rules, and we mistake this swirl of thoughts and associated emotions, mingled with the input of physical perceptions and sensations, for who and what we are.

Each of us is a large-language model housed in a meat machine — or at least that’s what we are in the dreamlike hyper-identity of these body–mind ego selves. Maybe by deliberately incorporating AI into formal education, and learning to use it intelligently instead of letting it use us, we can not only enhance the educational experience according to the values we’ve attached to it, but also learn more about ourselves in the very process of grokking our weird kinship with this sometimes alien-seeming technology.

Warm regards,

“Matt”