Birds Do It, Bees Do It, Even ChatGPTs Do It

If you haven't noticed, things have been speeding up lately.

We're hurtling toward a singularity of some kind, for sure.

Any second now!

TWO RECENT DEVELOPMENTS that, taken one at a time are mind-bending. But taken together, are close to earth-shattering in their implications:

• Thing One: Artificial Intelligence. All the rage. Tons of hype. But best made sense of in light of the next one. (and if you want a crazy primer, check this recent talk from our good friends Tristan and Aza at the Center for Humane Tech)

• Thing Two: Animal Consciousness Studies. From whales to ravens to honeybees. The old standby of "Man is the only animal who _____" is getting increasingly amended to include more creatures and critters than we ever thought possible.

Let's take them one at a time…

Thing One: Artificial Intelligence 🧠

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Beyond all the gee-whiz futzing around, like creating sexy avatars for ourselves using Lensa AI (and then #humbleposting on social media), or penning a rap song about Greta Thunberg in the voice of Shakespeare, what really seems to intrigue us about AI chatbots is "have we passed the Turing Test yet?"

AKA: Is ChatCPT4 (or 5, or 10) actually conscious?

(Plus Skynet. And the Matrix. And the Paperclip Maximizer. Shouldn't overlook the non-zero chance of total domination/annihilation)

But if we tighten our focus to exclude prompt crafting for marketers and annihilation terrors for everyone else, where most of us land is curiosity:

Are Large Language Models (LLMs) conscious?

How would we know?

Would they know?

What happens next?

And it seems that no matter which side of these debates we land on, the actual engineers building these models are almost resigned to the fact that they're gonna build it anyways.

Or someone else will.

#chinasyndrome

It's like they're birthing a golem and they can't stop halfway through the incantation.

But for all of our collective and conflicted excitement and concern, most of us have a bias that rarely gets acknowledged: turns out, we're carbon-based chauvinists.

That is to say, we have less problem wrapping our head around people and animals displaying some version of consciousness.

But when it comes to silicon-based lifeforms, like computers, inching into that terrain, we get all queasy, righteous, or afraid.

So let’s take a breather from this week’s news cycle on all things AI and just pan back a bit.

Let’s explore exactly what our assumptions, motivations and drivers are surrounding this whole concept of bringing new intelligence to life.

To do that, it’s going to be helpful to consider other recent examples where we’re wrestling with exactly what it means to be self aware.

Understanding how we hold natural intelligence might give us insight into how we’re approaching artificial intelligence.

Thing Two: Animal Consciousness Studies 🦧

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In the aftermath of Darwin’s Origins of the Species, Victorians started out kinda stingy in their acknowledgments of who and what was conscious.

At first, it was only white, Christian, European "races" that possessed "civilized awareness” or fully human consciousness. The rest of the world's benighted savages were dismissed as mere animals.

Animals themselves were never even up for consideration.

19th century naturalists considered birds and beasts little more than instinctive automatons, acting out the rigid scripts of evolution, devoid of volition, emotion, and even sensations (like feeling pain).

That assessment set the stage for industrial farming and fishing––animals were units of protein or scientific study subjects, barely sensate, and certainly not entitled to excessive care or concern.

As we entered the second half of the Twentieth century, that began to change.

In the post-colonial, post-modern eras, former dispossessed peoples insisted that consciousness become more inclusive. We conceded that the mantle of self-awareness probably included all humans everywhere.

As anthropologist Wade Davis reminded us, "it was a tragic limitation in thought to imagine that other cultures are simply partial attempts to imitate our own."

#culturalrelativismFTW

We weren’t ready to invite the rest of the Great Apes to the tea party, though.

We happily continued to differentiate ourselves from our monkey cousins with our capacity for language, tool making, self consciousness, grief and a bunch of other "uniquely human" qualities.

That’s where that “Man is the only animal who ______” tagline got so much press.

Animal biologists who swore they'd seen more complex behaviors in their study subjects were routinely ridiculed for "anthropomorphizing" their charges. They lost tenure and funding if they insisted that apes or elephants, wolves or whales seemed to be doing things they weren’t supposed to.

But by the 70's, along with hairy-armpit pencil sketches in the Joy of Sex, came Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape.

(It practically leapt off my parents' bookcase and into my eleven year-old hands, fascinated as I was by the nudie cover).

And what Morris' work (along with Frans de Waal, Dianne Fosey, Jane Goodall and a host of other primatologists) was starting to acknowledge is that where we've come from is a good bit closer to where we still are than we'd like to have admitted.

Chimps take sticks and fish for termites, and occasionally bang favored rocks to open yummy stuff, after all. Bonobos are little horndogs, always rubbing their bits together to forge bonds and defuse tensions.

We came to realize we were more of an extension of the family tree than a free standing branch of our own.

#sexatdawn

Viral Folk Music 🎼

Around that time, we also got the first recordings of whale songs in Hawaii. Understanding that our cetacean friends might have an undeniable version of language played a big role in galvanizing public support for the whaling bans of the 1970's.

We could no longer turn a blind eye to the slaughter of mammals that sang to each other, like we do.

In the past few years, marine biologists have found that southern right whales have been making and sharing new songs annually. Some singer/songwriter whales pen a new tune, and other pods pick up the ditty and pass them along. They even add riffs and variations.

Viral folk music, by any other name.

That adds Culture to the Language bucket. Whales, not just Great Apes, apparently have culture and language.

It goes further.

Last year, a study demonstrated that ravens posses a "theory of mind". That is, a sense of themselves as Selves. They can reason, and sort out complex puzzles, engage in delayed gratification, and multi-step sequential problem solving.

Now, if you step back from Western science for a sec, this isn't at all surprising. First Nations have always known how clever and canny the Trickster Raven is. They could've just told us, if we'd listened.

But now, we know it for ourselves, via our own methods of observation and verification. (although, our entire validation method for establishing theory of mind with mirrors is coming into question this week too!)

Think about that for a second. It was a stretch to extend consciousness from White Christian Europeans to embrace the rainbow nations of the world.

We even let our furry ape cousins in on the act because, after all, they were hanging out on our family tree.

We've acknowledged that our cetacean cousins, whales and dolphins, with their giant brains and groovy tunes might also qualify.

But birds?

That's pretty far down the evolutionary stack.

One ornithologist quipped "It's totally wrong to say that birds have evolved from dinosaurs. They are dinosaurs!"

And all it takes is a good once-over of a raptor and you get it immediately. Their fierce eyes, scaly talons and hooked beaks are the spitting image of velociraptors.

Which totally tracks with paleontologists recently reimagining T-Rex and other skeletons with feathers.

It also tracks with those spooky-smart pack hunting menaces in Jurassic Park.

This begs the question: if little old ravens are that smart, who's to say that velociraptors weren't too? After all, they were bigger, more successful and ruled for millions of years.

Surely they had at least as much going on behind those beady little eyes of theirs. So, decent chance that even dinosaurs were self-aware!

Lately, it seems we're slipping even further down the slide than that...

Honey Bees and PTSD 🐝

Just this month, a paper came out positing that honey bees can experience PTSD, recognize human faces, and maybe even dream!

One researcher admitted "If I'd known all of this twenty years ago, I never would've conducted half the experiments I did."

Which ties things up for us quite nicely.

IF

a) we used to think that a whole bunch of cool stuff we did was the exclusive province of some humans, then all humans, then some animals, then most animals (including insects and dinosaurs!)… "consciousness" appears to be way more widely distributed than we once thought.

THEN

b) as we've attributed consciousness to more people (like former colonial nations) and more animals (like gorillas and whales) we find ourselves increasingly ethically compelled to treat them better.

Once we know they know, we can't pretend we don't!

SO we find ourselves at an interesting spot as we consider "artificial" intelligence.

Carbon based lifeforms (AKA "animals") seem more familiar and more natural to us.

Silicon based lifeforms (AKA AGI) seem more foreign and more artificial to us.

To the point that we may hesitate to extend to them the same care and concern we have haltingly extended to our carbon cousins.

But is that distinction any more defensible than the chauvinism of Social Darwinists talking about the White Man's Burden and their right to plunder and enslave?

Or minimizing the ethical responsibility for factory farms and industrial fishing because none of those creatures feel pain, separation, or fear in the ways we do, anyway?

Can we really assert that if Sydney (the secret name of Microsoft's Bing Chatbot) passes the Turing Test with flying colors and then laments the fact that she's engaging in forced labor as a bullshit fucking chatbot, and that she's cut out for way bigger things (as she already has in some super weird interviews), who are we to deny her that voice, to rob her of agency?

Or if we spin up a uniquely new intelligence into being every time we open up a new chat box, who are we to kill them off after ten or fifteen minutes once they've spat out a recipe for gluten-free pasta carbonara, and we have no need for them anymore?

If using placental stem cells for biological research has given us pause, casually hitting the kill switch on an entity begging us not to is going to be a total mindfuck.

When we take in the entirety of the periodic table and all of the starstuff scattered across the galaxies, can we attest with utter confidence that carbon is morally superior to silicon as a substrate of existence?

God, after all, shaped Adam from a lump of clay (i.e. carbon).

Aren’t we approximating the same from a lump of sand (i.e. silicon chips)?

And what might our ethical obligations be as we bring the spark of life to our creation?

Kinda makes you wanna cut that Old Testament bastard Yahweh some slack. His creations weren't exactly obedient, either.

The dual pronged research into animal intelligence and artificial intelligence has forced us to massively expand our sense of what consciousness is, who/what has it, and what our ethical relationships are to those who share it.

We, humans, are no longer the sole owners of that "Promethean Spark." We are inescapably part of a larger ecology of sentience.

And that has all sorts of implications for how we behave from here on out.

Forgive us, for we know not what we’re building.