The Human Flaw in AI

To understand the human flaw, we must first understand human potential.

Human beings possess an unusual collection of abilities. We communicate complicated thoughts to one another. We remember the past and imagine a future that has not yet occurred. We reason, plan, experiment, teach, learn, joke, grieve, cooperate, compete, love and seek to be loved. We develop moral codes and struggle with conscience. We care for people who cannot care for themselves. We form friendships with people to whom we are neither biologically nor legally connected simply because we enjoy their company.

We create music and art for no apparent survival advantage other than the pleasure and meaning they provide. We even prepare elaborate meals when the biological requirement could be satisfied by simply consuming enough calories to remain alive. Sometimes, of course, we consume considerably more than enough.

Human beings do not merely survive together. We organize.

A person may acquire an education, learn a trade or profession, go to work, earn money, provide food and shelter for a family, raise children, seek medical care when someone becomes ill, develop friendships, participate in a community, and plan for a future that may be decades away. Thousands of strangers can combine their individual abilities to construct an apartment building in which hundreds of other strangers will live. Someone designs it. Someone calculates whether it will remain standing. Others manufacture the materials, transport them, assemble them, install electricity and plumbing, inspect the finished structure, finance its construction, and eventually maintain it. No single individual needs to know how to do everything. Human beings learned instead to combine knowledge.

That ability changed everything.

Humans could preserve what one person discovered and allow another person to begin from there. Each generation did not have to rediscover fire. A child could be taught what had taken previous generations years, decades, or centuries to learn. Spoken language allowed knowledge to travel between people. Writing allowed knowledge to travel across generations. Education eventually organized that accumulated knowledge so that one human lifetime could begin with lessons inherited from thousands of years of other human lives.

Human progress became cumulative.

And much of it began with necessity.

An early human who picked up a rounded stone had an object. The moment someone recognized that the stone could accomplish something the human body could not, the object became a tool.

The first inventions did not require factories, laboratories, electricity, or written instructions. They required observation. “For a while, we simply let humans be wonderfully clever animals figuring out how to stay alive and make staying alive a little easier.”

Fire

Fire was different from a stone. Humans did not invent fire. They learned to use it, preserve it, and eventually create it when they needed it.

Fire provided warmth and light. It offered protection from predators. It made some foods easier to eat and safer to consume. It allowed humans to survive in colder environments and extended useful activity beyond daylight.

But fire also introduced humans to something that would become increasingly important as their knowledge grew: power had to be controlled.

A small fire could warm a human being. A larger fire could cook food for many. An uncontrolled fire could destroy the shelter it was meant to warm.

The fire had no preference.

It did not know whether it was warming a child, cooking a meal, clearing land, or destroying a home. The intention belonged to the human using it.

And once humans learned what fire could do, there was another question.

What else can we do with it?

That question would eventually help transform clay, metals, tools, weapons, transportation, industry, and civilization itself.

But that was still far ahead.

For now, humans had fire.

And they kept it burning.