Goetheanum | When the Past Rolls into the Future

About the job

When the Past Rolls into the Future

What defines us as human beings is our body. Through it, we experience reality. AI has no body and no spiritual superorganism that – as with living beings – can alter their habitats. A comparative analysis from a natural scientific perspective.

It is not a trend of recent decades, but of past centuries, that increasingly allows us humans to live in a world of information. With writing, a cultural technique emerged that enabled humans to create a world, the "corpus of knowledge." This corpus has long been so vast that it is utterly impossible to grasp more than a vanishingly small part of this immense world of knowledge and information within a lifetime. Considering this, the question arises on what basis we consider ourselves capable of judgement. But suppose, for example, we could read all texts ever written on the question of how a stone falls: the texts of Aristotle, treatises of the Scholastics, the modern representatives of mechanical philosophy up to Galileo, Newton’s treatises, multiverse quantum theories, and finally string theorists – would this knowledge make us capable of judgement on the matter? I do not think so. Ultimately, it is our embodiment and the reality check made possible through it, in this case in the form of experiment, that first enables us to comprehend the meaningful context of all these treatises. Disembodied beings – regardless of their intelligence – cannot grasp the question. Whenever a question concerns our world, be it scientific, cultural, or political, it can ultimately not be answered in the logical realm but through a reality check. Therefore, the natural sciences are not based on knowledge but on experience, which makes us capable of judgement.

Phenomena of Emancipation of Information

Yet a reality check is becoming increasingly difficult amid the flood of information. The globalisation of the media landscape – especially through digital media – increasingly leads readers of a news item to admit they are not capable of judgement, as a reality check is spatially and temporally excluded. Information today is often hardly verifiable; it "emancipates" itself from personal life contexts. As a physicist, I know the phenomenon that in huge data sets almost any statement can be found and logically supported by further contexts, without it being clear what it has to do with reality. The rise of fact-checks, terms like "fake news," "alternative facts" implicitly acknowledge that a reality check is becoming ever more difficult. AI merely continues this trend.

Language models like ChatGPT are among the most remarkable technical developments of recent years; both the linguistic and substantive quality of the generated texts are often admirable. Since they are based solely on the "corpus of knowledge" but cannot establish any direct reality reference, one can vividly study in them how the internal logical structure of a text completely emancipates itself from whether the described has any reality reference or is counterfactual, i.e., contradicts real events such as historical occurrences, etc. Through more precise training methods, developers have succeeded in recent years in reducing counterfactual statements, often called "hallucinations." However, I wonder whether their presence should be regarded less as a problem of the programming of language models and more as a characteristic of a gigantic "corpus of knowledge" that is increasingly beginning to emancipate itself from reality in its contents. – What currently appears to us mostly as perhaps an amusing malfunction of AI threatens to become the new normality of a society living more and more outside bodily perception in the future. Does artificial intelligence not reflect phenomena that we could already study in ourselves? From this perspective, the concern that AI systems might become increasingly similar to humans in the future seems unfounded, precisely because humans are becoming increasingly similar to AI. Waldorf education and Goetheanism, in their commitment to regular and conscious, sensory and bodily experience, increasingly appear as indispensable, existential demands of the present.

This text is an excerpt from an article published in the weekly journal "Das Goetheanum." You can read the full article on the journal’s website. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can get to know the journal for 1 CHF/€.

Cover image fibre optic connections in a server room. Photo: Albert Stoynov/Unsplash