AI requires humans to learn love: Commentary

To survive in the age of artificial intelligence, humans must retain their uniquely human qualities of emotion, error, ambivalence, and irrationality within the digital realm, according to a commentary in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. This echoes Theodor W. Adorno's observations from the 1940s, where humans mimicked the inanimate to cope with overwhelming nature, a strategy termed 'mimesis' for self-preservation.

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To overcome nature, man imitates the dead. That was the disturbing observation about man's relationship to the world that Theodor W. Adorno formulated together with Max Horkheimer in the 1940s.

Today, a similar challenge arises not from nature, but from artificial intelligence. The question shifts from how humans build machines to conquer nature, to how humans should interact with machines that could potentially conquer them. This process of adapting to AI, or 'mimesis,' is unfolding in three stages, with the first two already experienced.

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How do we deal with the machines that could conquer us?

The initial stage saw technology hijacking human attention, transforming it into a tradable asset. Social networks monetized user engagement, turning clicks and scrolls into a business model, a phenomenon predicted by economist Herbert Simon in 1971 as information overload leading to attention poverty.

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Technology first hijacked our senses.

The second stage involves an emotional connection with AI systems. Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed this as early as the 1960s with his chatbot 'Eliza,' where users developed strong attachments. Currently, over 800 million people weekly interact with AI systems, a third of whom engage in personal, existential dialogues. Young people increasingly turn to AI chatbots for life guidance, a modern manifestation of what Donald Horton and Richard Wohl termed 'parasocial interaction' in 1956.

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What Herbert Simon described in 1971 as a structural problem of an information-rich society, namely that information overload inevitably leads to attention poverty, is today the business basis of the tech industry.