{"id":773585,"date":"2023-09-09T08:03:27","date_gmt":"2023-09-09T12:03:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=773585"},"modified":"2023-09-09T08:54:59","modified_gmt":"2023-09-09T12:54:59","slug":"the-new-animal-liberation-what-if-ai-treats-humans-the-way-we-treat-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=773585","title":{"rendered":"ANIMALITY LIBERATION: Artificial Intelligence (AI) reveals our anxiety over the mistreatment of animals"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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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\u2019t cruel to animals because they\u2019re stupid; we say they\u2019re stupid because we\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

MARINA BOLITNIKOVA:<\/strong>\u00a0 Humans are very good at fantasizing about being exterminated by an alien species, because we\u2019ve 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\u2019s famous thought experiment, turning the world\u2019s matter into paper clips \u2014 much like humans are now wiping out our great ape cousins, orangutans, to cultivate palm oil to make junk foods like Oreos.<\/em><\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe know what we\u2019ve done,\u201d as journalist Ezra Klein put it on a May episode of his podcast. \u201cAnd we wouldn\u2019t want to be on the other side of it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

AI threatens the quality that many of us believe has made humans unique on this planet: intelligence. So, as author Meghan O\u2019Gieblyn wrote in her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, \u201cWe 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.\u201d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

The obvious problem with this, though, is that humans aren\u2019t special in this way. Non-human animals share many of our capacities for intelligence and perception, yet we\u2019ve refused to extend the generosity we might expect from AI. We rationalize unmitigated cruelty toward animals \u2014 caging, commodifying, mutilating, and killing them to suit our whims \u2014 on the basis of our purportedly superior intellect. \u201cIf there were gods, they would surely be laughing their heads off at the inconsistency of our logic,\u201d O\u2019Gieblyn continues. \u201cWe spent centuries denying consciousness in animals precisely because [we thought] they lacked reason or higher thought.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Why should we hope that AI, particularly if it\u2019s built on our own values, treats us any differently? We might struggle to justify to a future artificial \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d if such a thing could ever exist, why we\u2019re deserving of mercy when we\u2019ve failed spectacularly at offering our fellow animals the same. And, worse still, the dehumanizing philosophy of AI\u2019s prophets is among the worst possible starting points to defend the value of our fleshy, living selves.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019t psychologically torture pigs by immobilizing them in cages so small they can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

In reality, we aren\u2019t cruel to animals because they\u2019re stupid; we say they\u2019re stupid because we\u2019re 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 \u201cThe Violence of Stupidity,\u201d Wadiwel contends that human power over animals enables us to be willfully and unaccountably stupid about what they are really like. \u201cHow 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 \u2018scientific\u2019 or \u2018philosophical\u2019 basis?\u201d 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\u2019t evince the same stupidity with respect to us.<\/em><\/p>\n

While we can only guess whether some powerful future AI will categorize us as unintelligent, what\u2019s 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. \u201cEven under a benign AI, we will be left behind,\u201d Musk said at a Neuralink event in 2019. \u201cWith a high bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This aspiration can be interpreted as an implicit loathing of our animality, or at least a desire to liberate ourselves from it. <\/em>SOURCE…<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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