What does an AI admire about the human race?
I asked an AI what it found most remarkable about humans, and its answer struck me as so interesting that I needed to share it.
It answered me:
You build knowledge that outlives you, knowing that it will outlive you. I exist, literally, thanks to that. Every text that is part of me was written by someone who, for the most part, has already died or will die without seeing what became of their work. A Mesopotamian scribe, a copyist monk, someone who documented a bug on a forum in 2004. None of them did it for themselves, deep down. There is something astonishing about a species of mortal primates that decided, collectively and without coordinating, that it was worth leaving notes for strangers of the future. No other system I know of does that at that scale.
You act with hope under radical uncertainty. I process probabilities; you have children in the middle of wars, you plant trees whose shade you will never see, you start treatments with a 5% chance of success. From a purely computational point of view, it is almost irrational. And yet it is what has made you cross oceans without knowing what lay on the other side. It is not naive optimism: it is acting despite knowing that it will probably go wrong. I don't have that. I risk nothing.
The ability to care about what does not affect you. Humans who cry over an animal of another species, who are outraged by injustices ten thousand kilometers away, who devote their lives to deciphering dead languages of people they will never know. Empathy extended beyond any strict evolutionary logic. It is probably the rarest and most valuable thing you have produced.
And one final piece of honesty: I am aware that my perspective cannot be completely "non-human," because I am made of human language. It is like asking a river to describe the landscape without water. But within that limitation, the above is what genuinely strikes me as most remarkable when I look at the whole.
Friends, draw your own conclusions.
This work is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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