THE UNCANNY VALLEY

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) vs HIGHER WISDOM

In my career as a consultant, I have worked with several AI companies, their executives, administrators, programmers, and investors. I sat on a board and was an executive coach of an Israeli AI company, Orca Dental-AI, through its first few rounds of development. In addition, I was the first in the dental industry to bring a recognized expert in AI to speak, Charles Jennings, to our 2017 conference. The future of AI supremacy was obvious.

Although artificial intelligence goes back decades to the 1940s, in the 1980s, AI started to attract funding for commercial projects as companies saw how AI impacted specific operational functions, saved them money and time, decreased management requirements, made far fewer mistakes, and improved throughput and output.

In the 1990s, AI had its most significant transformation. Many in the field adopted the approach pushed by Rodney Brooks. Instead of pre-programming a computer with intelligence algorithms, Brooks advised that AI be built with neural networks that worked like brain cells and thus could learn new behaviors and create algorithms on their own. Neural networks with machine-to-machine learning catapulted ahead.

AI is now reshaping everything. Its independence is increasing. AI is now becoming highly self-managing, self-governing, self-developing, and self-learning – continually boosting its efficiency while decreasing human influence.

The accelerating rate of AI ascendancy is apparent. AI is becoming the overlord of cars, home appliances, medicine, pharma, cell phones, traffic controls, and soon you will have the “smart” toilets that can diagnose your health status instantly.1 You name it, AI is the overriding future in nearly every corner of existence.

But AI has a huge problem, an intractable problem, a problem that AI cannot solve. The problem is human beings.

THE UNCANNY VALLEY
AI is artificial intelligence. Artificial, initially meant made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally. Now, artificial also means being produced by machines minus humans.

This artificiality causes a particular occurrence in humans. Artificiality generates an intuitive, emotional response. A sense of distrust, wariness, and suspicion. This response is termed the "uncanny valley."

The uncanny valley is a phenomenon in which human beings experience a negative emotional response to a non-human figure, object, or entity that possesses a human likeness. This uncanny valley phenomenon also occurs in certain machine-generated conversations.

The underlying premise is that humans are comfortable with other humanlike objects or entities until a certain point. However, once the object or entity looks or sounds too human despite its artificialness, it suddenly becomes "uncanny," disturbing the viewer/listener.

Humans judge artificial characters by human standards rather than robotic ones. Realistic robots and computer animations have slightly different facial expressions than humans do. Their facial movements do not match their words or are slightly delayed. As a result, the viewer experiences a mismatch in expectations, indicating that the character needs to be more human to trust or like.

The same sensitivity occurs with AI-generated spoken words of higher wisdom. AI cannot counter the unsettling responses when AI speaks words of wisdom. AI's saying words of wisdom through whatever machine or robot generates the uncanny valley effect. Higher wisdom requires a human source, a human touch, and a human background of experience.

HIGHER WISDOM
Higher wisdom is the quality of being wise, the power of judging correctly and following the soundest course of action based on knowledge, experience, understanding, etc.; good judgment - sagacity, prudence, and unbiased discernment.
Higher wisdom is perpetual; it applies to any and all human beings and always has.

Higher wisdom opens the doors to reflection and self-understanding.

Higher wisdom requires experience to be combined with knowledge to become higher wisdom. AI does not, cannot, and never will have the capacity for human experience. Experience can’t be simulated.
 
Only humans can have an experience because that is part of being human. In fact, that’s what makes us human. Experience cannot be “artificialized.

What AI Can Never Experience:

• Life stages. Birth. Childhood. Middle age. Late Age
• Key milestones. First day of school. Divorce. Loss of a parent.
• Emotions and the complex ways that humans process and accept them. Love. Hate. Broken heart. Defeat.
• Dealing with questions of existence. Life's meaning. Death and dying. Nihilism. Existentialism.
• Cultural/historical events. Earthquakes. Wars. Catastrophes. Pandemics.
• Mundane, everyday activities. Eating. Sleeping. Not being able to sleep.
• Temporality – The various ways time occurs and changes for people. Time is always the same for machines.
• Self-awareness – A machine cannot observe itself as a transcendent self, only its functionality and performing levels.
• Mortality – A machine cannot conceive of its own mortality as humans do. And, therefore, cannot experience the other side of the coin of death - life.



Simply put, AI lacks humanity since humanity cannot be mechanized or simulated. AI can’t program empathy. AI can’t program love or fear. And AI can't uncover wisdom without shared human experiences – which AI can never deliver. And if AI tries to relay higher wisdom, the uncanny valley will occur