ANIMALITY LIBERATION: Artificial Intelligence (AI) reveals our anxiety over the mistreatment of animals
Although modern humans defend the exploitation of non-human animals in terms of their assumed lack of intelligence, this has never been the real reason for it. In reality, we aren’t cruel to animals because they’re stupid; we say they’re stupid because we’re cruel to them, inventing fact-free mythologies about their minds to justify our dominance. The human nightmare of subjugation by machines expresses a sublimated fear of our treatment of non-human animals being turned back on us. Future AI will categorize us as unintelligent, what’s clear is that there is an explicit and concerning contempt for the human animal among prominent AI boosters. AI research itself has strong ties to transhumanism, a movement that aims to radically alter and augment human bodies with technology. Its most extreme aspirants hope to merge humanity with computers, excising suffering from life like a tumor from a cancer patient and living in a state of everlasting bliss. This aspiration can be interpreted as an implicit loathing of our animality, or at least a desire to liberate ourselves from it.
MARINA BOLITNIKOVA: Humans are very good at fantasizing about being exterminated by an alien species, because we’ve always been good at devising creative ways of doing it to our fellow creatures. AI could destroy humanity for something as stupid as, in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s famous thought experiment, turning the world’s matter into paper clips — much like humans are now wiping out our great ape cousins, orangutans, to cultivate palm oil to make junk foods like Oreos.
You might even say that the human nightmare of subjugation by machines expresses a sublimated fear of our treatment of non-human animals being turned back on us. “We know what we’ve done,” as journalist Ezra Klein put it on a May episode of his podcast. “And we wouldn’t want to be on the other side of it.”
AI threatens the quality that many of us believe has made humans unique on this planet: intelligence. So, as author Meghan O’Gieblyn wrote in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, “We quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.” We tell ourselves, in other words, that even if AI may one day be smarter than us, unlike the machines, we have subjective experience, which makes us morally special.
The obvious problem with this, though, is that humans aren’t special in this way. Non-human animals share many of our capacities for intelligence and perception, yet we’ve refused to extend the generosity we might expect from AI. We rationalize unmitigated cruelty toward animals — caging, commodifying, mutilating, and killing them to suit our whims — on the basis of our purportedly superior intellect. “If there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,” O’Gieblyn continues. “We spent centuries denying consciousness in animals precisely because [we thought] they lacked reason or higher thought.”
Why should we hope that AI, particularly if it’s built on our own values, treats us any differently? We might struggle to justify to a future artificial “superintelligence,” if such a thing could ever exist, why we’re deserving of mercy when we’ve failed spectacularly at offering our fellow animals the same. And, worse still, the dehumanizing philosophy of AI’s prophets is among the worst possible starting points to defend the value of our fleshy, living selves.
Although modern humans defend the exploitation of non-human animals in terms of their assumed lack of intelligence, this has never been the real reason for it. If we took that argument at face value and treated animals according to their smarts, we would immediately stop factory-farming octopuses, which can use tools, recognize human faces, and figure out how to escape enclosures. We wouldn’t keep elephants in solitary confinement in zoos, recognizing it as a violation of their rights and needs as smart, caring, deeply social creatures. We wouldn’t psychologically torture pigs by immobilizing them in cages so small they can’t turn around, condemning them to a short lifetime essentially spent in a coffin, all to turn them into cheap cuts of bacon. We would realize that it’s wholly unnecessary to subject intelligent cows to the trauma of repeated, human-induced pregnancies and separation from their newborns, just so we can drink the milk meant for their calves.
In reality, we aren’t cruel to animals because they’re stupid; we say they’re stupid because we’re cruel to them, inventing fact-free mythologies about their minds to justify our dominance, as political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel lays this out in his brilliant 2015 book The War Against Animals. In a chapter called “The Violence of Stupidity,” Wadiwel contends that human power over animals enables us to be willfully and unaccountably stupid about what they are really like. “How else might we describe a claimed superiority by humans over animals (whether based on intelligence, reason, communication, vocalisation, or politics) that has no consistent or verifiable ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophical’ basis?” he writes. Humans, like animals, are vulnerable, breakable creatures who can only thrive within a specific set of physical and social constraints. We can only hope that future AI, however intelligent, doesn’t evince the same stupidity with respect to us.
While we can only guess whether some powerful future AI will categorize us as unintelligent, what’s clear is that there is an explicit and concerning contempt for the human animal among prominent AI boosters. AI research itself has strong ties to transhumanism, a movement that aims to radically alter and augment human bodies with technology. Its most extreme aspirants hope to merge humanity with computers, excising suffering from life like a tumor from a cancer patient and living in a state of everlasting bliss, as Bostrom, one of the main proponents of transhumanism, has suggested. Elon Musk, for instance, has said that he launched Neuralink, his brain-computer interface startup, in part so that humans can remain competitive in an intelligence arms race with AI. “Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind,” Musk said at a Neuralink event in 2019. “With a high bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.”
This aspiration can be interpreted as an implicit loathing of our animality, or at least a desire to liberate ourselves from it. SOURCE…
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