In my writing and rhetoric courses, students have plenty of opinions on whether AI is intelligent: how well it can assess, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information.
When I ask whether artificial intelligence can “think,” however, I often look upon a sea of blank faces. What is “thinking,” and how is it the same or different from “intelligence?”
From childhood, we are told that patience is a virtue and that good things will come to those who wait. And, so, many of us work on cultivating patience.
This often starts by learning to wait for a turn with a coveted toy. As adults, it becomes trying to remain patient with long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, misbehaving kids, or the slow pace of political change. This hard work can have mental health benefits. It is even correlated with per capita income and productivity.
But it is also about trying to become a good person.
As a professor, I’m fortunate to teach a course called World Religions for Healthcare Professionals that prepares students for the spiritual and ethical issues they may encounter in their careers. But the class often boils down to life’s big questions: What makes life worth living, and how should we live? How do you find your “calling”?
The default psychological setting for human beings is an unavoidable self-centeredness. We each stand at the center of our own thoughts, feelings, and needs, and thus experience them in a way that we cannot experience the thoughts, feelings, and needs of others.
Does wearing a mask stop the spread of COVID-19? Is climate change driven primarily by human-made emissions? With these kinds of issues dividing the public, it sometimes feels as if Americans are losing our ability to agree about basic facts of the world. There have been widespread disagreements about matters of seemingly objective fact in the past, yet the number of recent examples can make it feel as though our shared sense of reality is shrinking.
The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given “alternative facts” an influence previously not possible.
Bad information isn’t just a practical problem – it’s a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it’s about epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to “know” something, in the first place.
Ever had the feeling that you can’t make sense of what’s happening? One moment everything seems normal, then suddenly the frame shifts to reveal a world on fire, struggling with the pandemic, recession, climate change, and political upheaval.
That’s “zozobra,” the peculiar form of anxiety that comes from being unable to settle into a single point of view, leaving you with questions like: Is it a lovely autumn day, or an alarming moment of converging historical catastrophes?
It is a condition that many Americans may be experiencing.
