social intelligence | The Perfect Response

Personhood is a unique state rooted in carbon-sourced biology, not easily replicated by silicon-based machines.

In 2015 I wrote that “In reality, “humans have nothing to fear” from the growth of artificial Intelligence. “Most measures of it use the wrong yardsticks.”

Well, knock me over with a feather.

I seem to have been wrong about that. Job losses caused by new uses of A.I. make it apparent that many word and data handling jobs have indeed been given to computers running A.I. programs. The first contact many of us have with doctors offices, food services or even mental health services is some chatter-bot mascarading as the functional equivelant of an adaptable and sensitive person. The hubris that makes that possible is our mistake. I feel like a fraud every time I “chat” with a machine. But the fraud is on the other side.

Banks and Silicon Valley tech firms are now beginning to purge their staffs. Estimates suggest that perhaps organizations and businesses in the near future will have twenty percent fewer employees. Even so, I would still guess that A.I. is not going to cut it in some functions. Imagine as a new retailer you tout the advantage of guaranteeing a real customer service person immediately if you have a problem. That’s a claim I saw in an ad recently, representing a unique selling proposition.

What I missed in the first post here was that my mind was too focused on those workers whose jobs are either creative, or tied to the trickiest of forms of human problem solving. And my heart goes out to people who have been let go for nothing worse than serving as one of the human faces of an organization.

Well, knock me over with a feather. Job losses from new uses of A.I. make it apparent that many word and data handling jobs have indeed been given to computers running A.I. programs.

One key point in that rash post still stands and seems to be ignored by many in the A.I. community. It hinges on what personhood means, including having a sense of self. If this sounds wooly, it isn’t. If we think that computers, robots or chatterbots have a sense of individual identity, I would beg to differ. Without a personal human history that includes the biology of living in the physical world and adapting to a socially mediated and carbon-based life cycle, a machine is just a machine. We have a biography, a family lineage, a sense of place, and a collection of life-transforming experiences. Our lives must reckon with the processes attraction, illness, aging, and fostering new beings as members of a tribe. A machine can only fake the experiences and feelings of a human being.

GW: "Alexa, How are you feeling today?"

Amazon A.I. Assistant: "My Monday is starting off marvelously." 
 
(This actual response can't help but be fraudulent. Forms of "me" suggest a living person,a being, someone's son or daughter, and social intelligence based on a lifetime of interactions. "Marvelously" suggests an ordinary language stab at an unearned feeling.)

All of these features are essential prerequisites for a sense of self, which is thinly constructed using the feedback and interactions of other humans. Humans can estimate the interiority of another person from the wealth of experiences that we and they have undergone. How does that get communicated in terms of the social intelligence values of empathy, sympathy, or feelings of alienation or identification? These states of mind or more than the products of algorithms in large language models of A.I.. They are unique to the human mind. It’s another reason to reassuract the idea of a person’s “soul,” and perhaps to routinely italicize artificial as a reminder that the word truncates the much richer meanings behind “intelligence.”

As I previously noted, just this issue of selfhood should remind us of the special status that comes from living through dialogue with others. A sense of self is complicated, but it includes the critical ability to be aware of another’s awareness of who we are. If this sounds confusing, it isn’t. This process is central to all but the most perfunctory communication transactions. As we address others we are usually “reading” their responses in light of what we believe they already have discerned about us. We triangulate between our perceptions of who we are, who they are, and what we imagine they may be thinking about our behavior. Put this sequence together, and you get a transaction that is full of feedback loops that involve estimates if intention and interest, and—frequently—a general desire born through human social intelligence to protect the feelings of others.

It’s an understatement to say these transactions are not the stuff of machine-based intelligence, and probably never can be. To be sure, the intricacies of many newer A.I. systems are beyond me, but I am still comfortable asserting that feelings, attitudes, experiences and beliefs that create human agency cannot be generated by GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs programmed to produce simulacrums of consciousness. As Walter Isaacson reminds us in The Innovators, we are carbon-based creatures with chemical and electrical impulses that create unique and idiosyncratic individuals. This is when the organ of the brain becomes so much more: the biographical homeland of an experience-saturated mind. With us there is no central processor. We are not silicon-based. There are the nearly infinite forms of consciousness in a brain with 100-billion neurons with 100-trillion connections. And because we often “think” in ordinary language, we are so much more—and sometimes less—than an encyclopedia of large language algorithms.

Had we not been given so fitting a term, someone would have surely had to invent it.

It is virtually impossible to think of the effects of most forms of complex communication—from talk therapies to film—without addressing the capacities of key agents to acquire understandings that privilege compassion over judgment. As film critic Roger Ebert noted about movies, “films are empathy machines.” We want to connect, and so we are drawn in when we see ourselves in the behaviors of others. It is an axiom of screenwriting that viewers will need to align with at least one character within a story.

Despite its obvious place as an essential feature of the fluent communicator, the capacity for empathy is unevenly distributed across any population. Especially in these sour times, with many happy to describe their estrangement from others. But empathy remains a central capacity necessary for individuals engaged in true interactive communication.

Empathy is a bond created by recognition of oneself in someone else’s experience. Or, as Martin Hoffman ingeniously describes it, empathy is “an affective response more appropriate to someone else’s situation than to one’s own.” It simultaneously acknowledges the authenticity of another’s feelings and suggests the momentary creation of a more personal shared experience. It is a reminder that we are not alone, even when we feel estranged from other people. Empathy happens when we meet the challenge to imagine the inner lives of others.

President Obama after Hurrican Sandy White House Photo by Pete Souza — _{President Obama after Superstorm Sandy in 2012}

The word itself was not the invention of academic psychology, but grew from German aesthetic theory at the beginning of the 20th Century. Robert Vischer was looking for a way to express the idea of projecting oneself onto another object (Einfühlung). He wanted to find a vocabulary that would help in the analysis of the individual’s response to the visual arts. Had he not discovered so fitting a term, others would have surely had to invent it. It is virtually impossible to think of the effects of most forms of complex communication—from film to talk therapies—without addressing the capacities of key agents to acquire empathetic understanding.

To some extent we seem hardwired for simple forms of empathetic responses. In his Social Intelligence 2006, Psychologist Daniel Goldman describes an unlearned “primal empathy” that flows from simple contact with others. We and other primates are naturally inclined to “read” facial and physical expressions, converting them into tentative understandings about what others may be experiencing. The threshold of awareness can be measured at the margins, as when a primate or infant is able to recognize itself (as opposed to an unknown or threatening alien) on a reflective surface. This kind of “mirroring” begins a sequence of consciousness that includes thinking as if they were the other. “I know how you feel” may be a cliché for the ages, but it reasonably describes what we take to be relatively faithful inferences made in limitless ranges of situations. Knowledge of an individual and their world increases the likelihood that we will recognize some of their experiences as our own. In friends those bonds deepen and grow.

Most of us worry if we don’t find this impulse alive somewhere in the words or actions of a new acquaintance. We ‘read’ others for signs that they understand the challenges we express. The alternative is indifference or hostility: responses that school us into accepting feelings of estrangement.

Still, even with sincere effort, there is no guarantee. Familiarity can sometimes make empathy whither. Sometimes the more we know about another person, the less of a connection we feel. Biographers of famous people sometime report this effect. The advantage of a loyal pet is that it will rarely reveal a backstory that makes us question our willingness to project the best into their actions.

In clinical settings focusing on mental health, empathy still functions as a core value in client centered therapy. The idea of talk therapy without a supportive and accurate listener is almost unthinkable. If quick and critical judgment is the poison of too many troubled relationships, empathy and full consciousness of how each party is feeling is a necessary antidote. This therapy is predicated on the suspension of judgment long enough to understand another. Not surprisingly, the inability to be sympathetic is a recurring symptom in problematic mental processing, including paranoia, narcissism, and some forms of autism.

Because empathy is a subjective experience, it is easier to observe its basic impulse than to accurately map its affective meanings. We can strive for objective measures of it, but its sources are always bound in alignments and understandings unique to the individual. Thus, the great paradox of empathy is also the paradox of communication: we live in the isolation of a unique private consciousness, even while an innate quest for connection pulls us out of ourselves and toward others.