Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.
And that was in 1859.
Mill was using the idea to illustrate how bleak it would be to have a world in which humans didn't carve out their own fortunes. "It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself," he says. To Mill, it's incumbent on any human being to make of themselves the best example of a human being they can (he uses "man" and "men" and male pronouns to refer to humanity generally, as was the custom up until seventy or so years ago, but Mill was a noted feminist).
I like this bit:
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
I used to tell students to not look at life as a train track with just a series of predetermined destinations from which any deviation is a derailment. Instead, life ought to be seen as a large forest in which one can find different paths and opportunities in all directions. Obviously, Japan is well known as a country in which people follow prescribed life paths but somewhere in the philosophy behind the Japanese work ethic someone knew that's not enough. This is why the Japanese love sports so much and why so much care and attention is given to Japanese cuisine. The Japanese are masters of creature comforts. They have the most comfortable toilets in the world, the most efficient and friendly service staff.
Obviously, this isn't what John Stuart Mill had in mind. His idea of hard work for the purpose of self creation rather than for merely fitting in harmoniously with society is a fundamentally western idea and we can see it in both the best and the worst of what the west has produced. Yet many people in Japan are very concerned about AI.
Self-expression is important to me, not just my own but everyone's. I guess that's no surprise given that I'm an artist. I'm always excited by, and I do my best to encourage, students when they express themselves, artistically or otherwise, even on occasions when such expression is meant to insult me. It's these things, these trees "to grow and develop on all sides", that make up the forest of human existence.
But is there objective value in human accomplishment? Can we let machines do everything while we lounge poolside? I could speak to the compulsion for self-definition, to be noticed, to carve out an identity in society. But what if we chemically satisfied that compulsion? What if we had a combination of drugs and virtual reality aimed at satisfying that emotional need? Soma, essentially. Maybe it's time to read Brave New World again.
Suppose machines get to the point where they wonder about the worth of their own expression and accomplishment. Maybe I need to watch Blade Runner again. If we got to that point, when the AI is "more human than human", it could be simply a matter of one humanity abdicating for another. Perhaps current humanity is just the dying body cells to be replaced by others in a continually progressing organism.
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