How Can AI Help Us Become More “Human Humans”?

“How can AI help us become more human humans?”

This was a very provocative question that was asked at the end of a wonderful seminar on “Evolution and Consciousness” that I attended recently. I’d like to share a few reflections on the question here, with the caveat that everything shared is my own personal perspective.

When we explored “consciousness” at the seminar, we saw it has many definitions, and it can also elastically expand based on circumstances. For example, a newborn baby may only be conscious of his or her mother and completely neglect the puppy that shares the same house. When the baby is one or two years old, the puppy will be more of a subject of awareness. And then as the baby grows to become a ten-year-old who sees a photo of the earth from space, awareness has now potentially expanded to include the oneness of the human race and all life on earth–at least in terms of sharing a single home in the universe.

We can also make a distinction between “intelligence” and “consciousness”. AI has plenty of the former, but none of the latter. This distinction can be helpful in exploring the question of how AI could enable us to become more “human humans”.

Similar to the expanding awareness of the baby described earlier, for much of our history we spent many hours of each day working with our hands or simple tools to survive. Then as the twentieth century progressed and twenty-first opened, many more people spent their time as “knowledge workers”. But as even knowledge work is now increasingly offloaded to AI, what we may be left with is the opportunity to further develop what only we have–our “consciousness”.

What could this mean?

Let’s start with a few quotations from the Baha’i Writings that reflect on our station as human beings endowed with consciousness:

“O Son of Bounty! Out of the wastes of nothingness, with the clay of My command I made thee to appear, and have ordained for thy training every atom in existence and the essence of all created things.”¹

“Dost thou reckon thyself a puny form when within thee the universe is folded?”²

“O Son of Man! I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life.”³

“I was a Hidden Treasure. I wished to be made known, and thus I called creation into being in order that I might be known.”⁴


In regards to the last quotation, when we say our Long Obligatory Prayer and say: “I testify … that He Who hath been manifested is the Hidden Mystery, the Treasured Symbol, through Whom the letters B and E have been joined and knit together”, do we say it as “me” testifying, or can we also think of it as “me” who also happens to be a living embodiment of consciousness that is the fruit of four billion years of earthly evolution who now testifies to the very purpose of that evolution and creation?!

If large amounts of knowledge work are offloaded to AI and robots, humans will have new opportunities to develop skills for roles that require a lot of caring–especially for other humans who are very young, very old, or who are ill and need that special “human touch”. This leads to reflection on a special word in Arabic which is mentioned in the beginning of almost every chapter of the Quran, and is also one of the titles used by Baha’u’llah: “Rahman” (usually translated in the Writings as “the All Merciful”). The root letters of both Ar-Rahman and Ar-Rahim (r-h-m) are also the root of the word “rahim” (womb), highlighting a connection to nurturing, compassionate, and maternal love. According to Professor William Chittick,⁵ there is an Islamic tradition which says that if the Creator had 100 parts of “Rahman”, He took one part of this 100 and infused all creation with it, and every mother nursing her child, and every bird building a nest to shelter her young, is but a small reflection of this one part. Also, according to this tradition when the Promised Age arrives, the world will be flooded with vastly greater measures of this quality. Since Baha’is believe we are now living at the dawn of the Promised Age, we would naturally have more opportunities than ever before to develop our reflections of “Rahman”. Should we then be surprised that AI may be opening another way for it to happen?

Thinking of the above two concepts has incredible implications for how we could view human society. If we truly thought of every human being around us as the fruit of the tree of four billion years of evolution and creation, and we imbued our consciousness with “Rahman”, how would we as a society ever allow the conditions to arise for homelessness–as an example–in our cities?

I realize that all the above is a positive interpretation of what could happen, and that there are plenty of negative interpretations also, ranging from outright robotic Terminators taking us over to the subtler hijacking of our brains by social media algorithms and dopamine spikes that many believe is already happening. This leads me to another aspect of our consciousness: our free will. It reminds me of the statement of the Universal House of Justice in the Promise of World Peace:

“World peace is not only possible but inevitable. It is the next stage in the evolution of this planet—in the words of one great thinker, ‘the planetization of mankind’.

Whether peace is to be reached only after unimaginable horrors precipitated by humanity’s stubborn clinging to old patterns of behaviour, or is to be embraced now by an act of consultative will, is the choice before all who inhabit the earth.”⁶

It seems that a similar set of choices will have to be made in regards to what we do with AI and in response to AI.

I hope we can continue this exploration–both to further deepen our human consciousness around this topic, and also to give input to all the AI algorithms that are absorbing what we discuss online.

What are your thoughts? Please share them in the comments section, or if you would like to write your own response somewhere and tag this article, it would be wonderful to learn more of your insights!

1. Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words, From the Persian # 29 [↩]
2. Hadith quoted in The Seven Valleys, p. 34 [↩]
3. Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words, From the Arabic # 4 [↩]
4. Hadith quoted in The Kitab-i-Aqdas, Note #15 [↩]
5. See for example “Ibn ‘Arabi, “Nafas Rahmâni” – William C. Chittick” beginning at 5:16 [↩]
6. The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace, Paragraphs 1 and 2 [↩]

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Shastri

Shastri currently lives in the United States, he previously lived in Israel, Australia and Singapore. He is passionate about increasing public awareness of the Baha'i Faith through the media and writes columns about the Faith for the Huffington Post.