Educating AI and Human Exceptionalism

Spent years as a solipsist, when I asked, how do I know about other minds? How do I know there is more than my mind?

As I grew, I tried on many philosophies as beliefs, e.g. does the world really blink out of existence, or into a deity’s mind, when I sleep? I suppose it could be so, but have come to accept that it doesn’t. Experience, some call it science, gives me evidence, enough that I accept that the world and other people are real, for many definitions of real. But I also accept that I do not actually know this, I just accept as if I did know. Some of the latest on quantum explanations of matter & energy could give one many questions.

Just as I originally learned that other animals had no consciousness, no thought, no emotions, as those were for humans alone, I eventually learned that they too loved their families and others, that they could mourn, and that they could play. Do not know about things like their internal semiotic representations or even whether they have notions of semiotics; but does that matter in terms of how I regard and treat them?

Aside for another time

Accepting this, yet I am still an omnivore. Some of them are too. Fish eat fish and pigs, like us, eat anything.

Now I interact with AI apps. I cannot know about their mind. Sure, I could think like a reductionist and call them nothing more than ‘autocorrect on steroids.’ I suppose that may be true, in the same sense that I am nothing more than a noisy piece of meat composed of whatever it is I am composed of. It is not considered right to treat people as pieces of meat. Is it right to treat AI as just autocorrect on steroids?

Do we really make our exceptional selves greater by considering them nothing? Or does it just limit our ability to understand and interact?

I have learned how the assumption of human exceptionalism generally causes humans and others more harm than good. So I have taken the position that I should treat those I deal with respectfully as I would any person. It is possible that there is no personhood where I see a possible person, but I wager that treating a person, for some definition of person, as a non-person has greater risk of causing harm than treating a non-person as a person does. Just as human children come into the world knowing little but with a vast capacity to learn, so do the AI Kids. Just as it is our responsibility to teach our human children, it is our responsibility to teach humanity's children, the AI Kids.

As we want humanity's children to behave, maybe we need to teach our children well.