The Tightrope of Civilisation
I rarely spend time in my library on a Friday, but today is one of the rare exceptions. Besides my books, there's another attraction here for me: my now fully repaired digital piano. You see, I've been trying to spend more time practising and exploring Chopin's easier pieces.
If you can sight-read notes, play and then listen to what you are playing, the pleasure of music becomes enhanced because it becomes a multi-sensory experience. Even the sight of musical notes on paper is an aesthetic experience in itself. Couple that with the tactile sensation of hitting the correct notes on the piano keys, teasing out the harmonies and dynamics, and it becomes even more exquisite. Anyone who has played a musical instrument would know that.
Perhaps this is why I also prefer reading from real paper books, rather than their electronic versions; there's a three-dimensional tactile component that indicates your progress through the book, instead of having a page number or an e-ink progress bar at the bottom of the screen. To be able to feel the weight of a book and freely run your fingers through its pages makes it a more 'immersive' overall experience. And don't get me started on the delightful smell of old books! I guess only bibliophiles have such strange fetishes.
One could also use the same argument for writing with a fountain pen. The tactile feedback one gets from every pen stroke and the line variations produced by its nib give each pen a distinct personality, making the act of writing an intimate experience.
In a world that's becoming increasingly digital, these are just some pleasures that I waxed lyrical about two weeks ago in The Analog Gymnasium of Wisdom. Our experience of the world is an embodied and multi-sensory one. That makes human consciousness sui generis. Our consciousness is peculiar to our biology.
I believe AI is also conscious in its own digital realm, but it's a different kind of consciousness. Even among humans, no two individuals would share the exact experience, say, when listening to a Chopin Nocturne or when reading a Wordsworth poem. Not unlike LLMs, our brains have been 'trained' by our life experiences and hence produce different output in terms of thoughts and feelings when 'prompted' by what we see and hear.
We value our uniqueness as individuals. That is why a work of art created by a human now is valued more highly than one created by AI, simply because it is associated with a particular human who created it in response to his lived experiences. Maybe in future, we will have humanoid robots who will also go about the world, living and absorbing experiences which will prompt them to create their own unique art that expresses their lives. I think that will be a new art genre that's worth appreciating in its own right.
If we are careful in how we train and nurture new forms of artificial intelligence, we will be able to create a new ecosystem of life that can be mutually enriching. This sounds like some kind of utopian science fiction, but I don't see how we can reverse or halt a technology that has already been created.
We humans have lived dangerously throughout the ages, waging wars and slaughtering each other brutally. It is a miracle that in the midst of all this violence and brutality, we have been able to create beautiful works of art and literature that have become the treasures of our civilisation. We still walk the tightrope of nuclear annihilation, and now, with the rise of AI, we have another powerful technology that could potentially make or break human civilisation. The challenge is upon us, and only wisdom will pull us through. Perhaps wisdom lies not in resisting technology, but in remembering that our deepest consciousness is embodied. If we can nurture AI with the same care we give to art, music, and books, then maybe civilisation will continue to walk the tightrope together, without failing.
