What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of inquiry --Werner Heisenberg
Consider this scenario: A client approaches a lawyer and says, "My friend has cheated me!". In response to which, the lawyer asks two questions: "Why did your friend cheat you?" and "How did your friend cheat you?"
Clearly, they are two different questions and requires two different answers. The first one asks about motives and intentions behind the cheating, and the second one asks about the mechanism of the act.
Now consider this scenario: A school student approaches a scientist and asks two questions: "Why does a lunar eclipse occur?" and "How does a lunar eclipse occur?" The answer to both of these questions is the same!
In our scientific models of physical reality, there is no difference between "why" and "how"! This is because, in our models of physical reality, there is no such thing called "motive", "intention", and such elements of "free will" as a fundamental element of reality.
This is what I call "machine hermeneutics".
For the last few centuries, we have been adopting a specific hermeneutic or "way of inquiry" to understand and interpret reality. In this approach, we consider the entire universe to be an impersonal automaton powered by "energy" and whose dynamics are characterized by causality that began with the big bang. Everything else-- including life and its associated constructs like free-will, intentions, motives, etc. are all considered to be complex emergent properties of these impersonal causal dynamics.
Machine hermeneutics began in medieval Europe in the 18-19th century, and was greatly influenced by the industrial revolution. In this mode of inquiry, the study of reality and the design of machines go hand in hand. Machine hermeneutics replaced earlier models of reality that were overtly anthropomorphic. For instance, a physical theory that says that a lunar eclipse happens when the "moon covers itself with shame" or something like that, is (justifiably) considered unscientific, and discarded.
Focusing only on the mechanics of physical phenomena has clearly brought us great benefits. We can how build machines inspired by such phenomena and extend our capabilities and reach. Which is precisely what we have been doing for the last few centuries.
We have built more and more complex machines, so much so that the machines are now starting to replicate the ultimate frontier of human faculty-- our brains and intelligence.
Our machines today can replicate the mechanics of a number of activities that we thought were driven by the "human spirit"-- like creating artwork, writing poems, translating text, carrying on a conversation with another human, etc. Machines today can also autonomously take decisions and act on them.
The mechanics of human intelligence seems to have been unraveled! Or have they? Can we finally close the gap between why humans are intelligent and how humans are intelligent?
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Consider this case from 2016. where the police in Dallas used a robot to kill a suspect who was engaged with a shootout with them. Or the use of autonomous killing drones in the Ukraine war. There are videos that show (like this one) drones pursuing soldiers and taking them down, with the soldiers pretty much helpless to do anything against them. The more interesting (and disturbing) fact is in some of the pictures, the body language of the soldiers show that they have clearly given up-- and yet, the drone takes them down.
There is this axiom that drives human soldiers to kill on the battlefield-- "I do not want to kill someone with whom I have no personal enmity over, but if I do not kill the enemy soldier, he might kill me!"
In other words, humans (and all other living beings) hold their lives to be precious and resort to killing other living beings mostly as a means to preserve their own life (except when driven by ideology). An autonomous drone on the other hand, has no fear for its own life, and has no empathy for the other person. It is just programmed to kill, and cannot tell when the adversary is no longer a threat, and need not be taken down.
The AI in the drone only knows how to make the kill, and not why it is killing!
Before our lives were taken over by machines, the why question was all pervasive and played a central role in our daily activities. It was also clearly distinct from the how question. We often had solutions that solely involved addressing the why question rather than the how question.
Suppose that we are back in the medieval times before the advent of automobiles, and we owned a horse carriage pulled by two horses. For the last few weeks after we bought a new horse, we notice that our journeys in the horse carriage have been very bumpy and uncomfortable because the two horses that are pulling the carriage are not synchronizing with one another. Before getting to ask how to make them coordinate with one another, we first ask, why are they acting in an uncoordinated manner. It may turn out that one of the horses that was newly acquired, is feeling insecure, or is in need of our attention and care. In such a case, all we may need to do is to spend more quality time with the horse in question and get it better acquainted with us.
Now imagine the same situation above in the present day, when we buy a new car, and find that it is not running well. We can be certainly sure that the reason for this would be something more mechanical-- like a faulty engine tune up or a loose connection somewhere.
But imagine AI driven cars in the not-so-distant future that learns about your preferences and customizes itself over time. Now, spending "quality time" with the car, suddenly becomes a thing! As cars get more intelligent, we may need them to understand not just how to drive us somewhere, but also why we're going somewhere and what it means! For instance, an autonomous car taking us to the airport to receive our family members may have different considerations to address from the same car taking us to a hospital near the airport in response to a medical emergency.
For too long, we have been thinking of reality as the ultimate machine. Even theories like Quantum Mechanics, only doubt the deterministic nature of mechanical causality (at least in the Copenhagen interpretation that interprets the wave function as the uncertainty in the knowledge of the observer), but do not give primacy to free-will itself. We will need a very different way of interpreting the universe as machines become an integral part of our lives and well-being.
