
Dear Commons Community,
Christopher Beha, a novelist, had guest essay in yesterday’s New York Times entitled, “A.I. Isn’t Genius. We Are.” His main theme is that:
“I am talking not about the quite reasonable anxiety surrounding the potential social and economic disruption of a powerful new technology but about the fundamental worry that a digital machine might one day exhibit — or exceed — the kind of creative power we once believed unique to our species. Of course, the technology is still relatively young, and it might make good on many of its promises. But the obsolescence of human culture will almost certainly not come to pass.
The root of this worry is not an overestimation of technology but a radical underestimation of humanity….”
He concludes:
“There are many reasons our culture has largely given up on geniuses, some of them very good. We’re living in a thoroughly fraudulent era whose signature figures, from Donald Trump to Sam Bankman-Fried, have made the claim of genius central to their frauds. We are also increasingly sensitive to the harm caused when genuine creative talent is excused for abusive behavior. On all fronts, we have become rightly impatient with those who make up their own rules.
But our suspicion of genius runs much deeper than the social and political turmoil of the past decade. In fact, it’s as old as the concept of genius itself. While Socrates inspired a nearly religious devotion in his followers, many Athenians found him frankly ridiculous. Still others found him dangerous, and this faction managed to sentence him to death, a verdict he accepted with equanimity. (He didn’t mind leaving this life, he reported, because his genius had nothing to say against it.)
Many of the holy figures of medieval Christianity resembled Socrates not just in their humility and simplicity but also in the threat they posed to the surrounding society whose norms they rejected. Often enough they faced death at that society’s hands as well. Even Kant noted the perpetual challenge of distinguishing the genius from the charlatan: “Nonsense, too, can be original,” he acknowledged.
What seems to have changed more recently is not our understanding of the risk of the pseudo-genius but our suspicion of the very possibility of genius of the genuine sort, and this has everything to do with the larger cultural developments of the past 50 years. If the critical turn “means anything,” the American theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in a classic study of postmodernism, it signals the end of “quaint romantic values such as that of the genius.” From the vantage point of cognitive science, meanwhile, the classic notion of genius makes no sense. Clearly some people have more processing power than others, but the idea of some cognitive quality other than sheer intelligence is incoherent.
Our culture seems now to reserve the designation of genius almost exclusively for men who have put quantitative skill to work in accumulating enormous wealth. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all been awarded the status at one time or another. In the process we have rendered the term useless. When the clearest sign of genius is a net worth in 10 figures, we have come a long way from the ascetic outsider who suffers for the truth. Under such conditions, it’s hardly surprising that the term is treated as a cynical bit of marketing we’d be better off without.
Yet we might have given up more than we can afford to lose, as the great A.I. panic demonstrates. Ironically, our single greatest fear about A.I. is that it will stop following the rules we have given it and take all its training in unpredictable directions. In other words, we are worried that a probabilistic language-prediction model will somehow show itself to be not just highly intelligent but also possessed of real genius.
Luckily, we have little reason to think that a computer program is capable of such a thing. On the other hand, we have ample reason to think that human beings are. Believing again in genius means believing in the possibility that something truly new might come along to change things for the better. It means trusting that the best explanation will not always be the most cynical one, that certain human achievements require — and reward — a level of attention incompatible with rushing to write the first reply. It means recognizing that great works of art exist to be encountered and experienced, not just recycled. Granted, it also means making oneself vulnerable to the pseudo-genius, the charlatan, the grifter. But belief of any kind entails this sort of risk, and it seems to me a risk worth taking, especially when the alternative is a stultifying knowingness.
If we really are better off without the Romantic idea that certain people are exceptions to the general rule of humanity, that they will favor us with their insight if only we don’t force them to abide by the constraints that apply to the rest of us, perhaps we could instead return to the old Socratic-mystic idea that genius might visit any of us at any time. There is a voice waiting to whisper in our ears.
Everything about our culture at the moment seems designed to eliminate the space for careful listening, but the first step in restoring that space might be acknowledging that the voice is out there and allowing that it might have something important to say.”
A heavy but interesting message!
Tony