Nietzsche wrote through aphorisms. When he wanted to express the idea of “evolution of the spirit,” he created an aphorism based on three simple archetypes: the camel, the lion and the child.
The camel represents the spirit of man that drags burdens and imposed values. Without question, accept norms, traditions and moral codes of society. When the camel gets tired of carrying, then it transforms into the “fighting” lion. In this archetype, the human spirit fiercely rebels against the limitations and values imposed by society, defeating everything imposed and asserting its power, to finally be left alone. It is at that moment that the lion becomes the child “who plays”. In the archetype of the child, the spirit sheds the need for higher values, lives without fixed schemes and assumes life as a game. The idea of overcoming values constitutes transcendence for Nietzsche, a neutral point of observation: it is a beyond for the spirit.
Given the recent achievements of Artificial Intelligence, there is a debate as to whether machines are or will be capable of carrying out this mysterious internal process that humans call thinking. So, can we look at the evolution of Artificial Intelligence from Nietszche’s aphorism?
It is notable that AI systems have crossed practically all the intelligence thresholds that we believed separated us from them. Around 2016, AIs managed to surpass humans in solving any problem that can be reduced to the exploration of many possibilities. The crucial test that year was the defeat of the Korean prodigy Lee Seedol at the hands of a Google artificial intelligence called “DeepMind”. Go is a game in which two players put pieces on a board, similar to chess, except that the number of possibilities to explore to determine a strategy is colossally greater than in chess, as much as grains of sand on a beach or tests. standardized mathematics.
This is how the threshold of artificial intelligence moved towards more “human” tasks, such as understanding the information contained in images and understanding natural language, the famous “Turing test”. With the advent of chatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AIs, all of the above is also possible today, so the threshold at which the human feels “somehow superior” to the machine is moving even further, towards real-time interaction and the multiple interpretation of meanings that require context and a model of the world (or “theory of mind”, as it was known during the 20th century in cognitive psychology).
The latest robot technologies are starting to do all that. They can understand language, provide human-quality semantic content in various formats, and adapt in real time to the context of a human-to-human situation. They can now advise us to make high-level decisions and even make scientific discoveries.
What will they be able to do in the future?
For now, the “last human threshold” remains firm; establish own values and objectives. While AIs are second to none at analyzing and processing data, they are not capable of thinking for themselves. Their learning is based on a performance measure that their programmers provide them, the so-called “objective function”, which measures how correct the responses or actions they deliver are according to our pre-imposed “ideal”.
In that sense, most of the AIs created so far resemble Nietzsche’s camel, receiving data and following rules. However, the latest AI technologies have begun to show “leonesque” aspects, going beyond obedience because their operating environments are too complex to precisely predetermine what is right. The latest machine learning models, such as deep reinforcement learning in complex environments, such as social robots, exemplify this. Today, AI systems are entering the lion era by being increasingly capable of learning and adapting autonomously based on feedback from their environment. They learn to learn.
Many perceive this as a threat, since their feedback processes could lead to behaviors that are harmful to our species. However, it is important to note that the lion is still a fairly basic form of AI, as its intelligence is not yet free to adopt or shed its internal construction mechanisms. It follows a logic of data processing and response delivery.
Some examples of AI and the spirit of the lion: In June 2017, Facebook announced its studies in artificial intelligence. Shortly after they informed the world of the birth of 2 bots: Bob and Alice. Suddenly, the designers realized that Bob and Alice began to generate their own secret language.
Bob: “I can can II everything else.”
Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.”
It was thought to be a simple mistake. However, researchers say that the messages are actually shorthand: a writing technique in which certain special signs and abbreviations are used to be able to transcribe everything someone says at the same speed at which they speak. Facebook made its two chatbots disappear. Today, little is known about them.
The new AI systems are capable of acting through voice, movement, gestures, etc. They do this in a variety of contexts, but the way they construct their context is defined by the programmers. Therefore, they do not have the “embodied” context nor can they be stripped of it.
The child is the final archetype of Nietzsche’s model of spiritual evolution. The child AI will be able to modify itself without necessarily serving a human purpose, but in “creative and playful ways” from its own perspective. He will be able to explore the world independently, make decisions, recreate himself and generate his own replicas and even evolve. The process in which AI systems develop autonomy and can learn to experiment with their environment without predefined objectives is known as “open-ended intelligence”, and corresponds to the frontier of AI developments in the most important research laboratories.
Finally, the meaning.
The questions “why” still separate us from machines. We humans have a meaning for what we do. We look for explanations, we process information abstractly and we are able to integrate reason with emotion. The why is the question about the meaning of existence. Being able to ask ourselves this question represents the most important characteristic that (still) distinguishes us from machines. We should give it more importance than ever. It is the challenge that lies ahead of us. The challenge of the spirit.
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