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Why We Fear Diverse Intelligence Like AI

noemamag.com · 3,650 words · saved by 1 readers

Our fear of AI’s potential is emblematic of humanity’s larger difficulty recognizing intelligence in unfamiliar guises. Michael Levin is a distinguished professor and the Vannevar Bush chair in the biology department at Tufts University, as well as the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and associate faculty at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard University. We, as humans, seem driven by the desire to create a sharp line between us — or at best, living things — and “mere machines.” In a bygone era, it was easy to draw that line around the idea that human beings might have an immaterial essence that makes up our souls and that it defied the laws of physics; machines did not. Modern science has changed that. We and our synthetic brethren are all equally subject to the laws of physics, and maintaining a sharp distinction, in the face of progress in cybernetics, bioengineering, and computational cognitive science, is much more difficult. But what drives t

Why We Fear Diverse Intelligence Like AI Our fear of AI’s potential is emblematic of humanity’s larger difficulty recognizing intelligence in unfamiliar guises. m0 studio for Noema Magazine Credits Michael Levin is a distinguished professor and the Vannevar Bush chair in the biology department at Tufts University, as well as the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and associate faculty at the Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard University. We, as humans, seem driven by the desire to create a sharp line between us — or at best, living things — and “ mere machines .

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