Artificial intelligence is here.
We can debate whether it thinks in anything like the human sense, whether it is or ever will be conscious, how far it may develop, and what it may eventually become.
For the question here, none of that is essential.
Something else has happened: humanity now has a tool unlike anything it had before.
And almost immediately, something remarkably familiar happened.
We reached for the old yardstick.
Who has the bigger model?
Who has more computing power?
Who is faster?
Who will get there first?
Who will gain the advantage?
Who will win?
We know this yardstick well.
Cars: faster, more powerful.
Aircraft: higher, farther, faster.
Weapons: stronger, more accurate, more destructive.
Economies: bigger.
Computers: more powerful.
Nations: stronger.
Now intelligence: more powerful, faster, first.
The tools change.
The way we measure them remains remarkably persistent.
More. Faster. Stronger. First. Winner.
That does not mean the old yardstick is wrong.
It has given humanity a great deal.
Perhaps it is entirely right.
But how do we know?
When something genuinely new appears, perhaps it is worth doing something simple before using the old measure again:
check the yardstick itself.
What if we change the question rather than the answer?
Take a perfectly familiar question:
Who won?
Now change a few words:
What did humanity gain from the victory?
The facts have not changed.
The winner is still the winner.
The loser is still the loser.
What changed is the unit of measurement.
A nation can win a war.
A company can eliminate a competitor.
One economic system can displace another.
One idea can defeat another.
But if the result leaves millions of people worse off, creates lasting humiliation, accumulates hatred, or helps produce another conflict a generation later, the victory is real while the human result becomes less obvious.
This does not mean victory is bad.
It does not mean nations should abandon their interests.
It does not mean the losing side must have been right.
We have simply changed the question.
Not only:
What did we gain?
But:
What, in the end, did humanity gain?
And suddenly something appears that the previous measure did not count.
Perhaps there is also a more mature meaning of victory.
Not only a condition in which an opponent can no longer resist.
But a condition in which a former opponent no longer has a reason to become an opponent again.
That is a very different result.
And a very different measure.
What is the value of someone who is different?
The same habit appears in the way we deal with difference.
Which person is smarter?
Which culture is right?
Which system is more effective?
Which society is better organized?
Whose path should prevail?
Try changing the question again:
What can they see that I cannot?
Another person may be wrong.
Another culture may be wrong.
Another society may choose a disastrous path.
But difference itself proves none of those things.
Even a wrong path contains information.
If someone follows it and reaches a dead end, others have learned at least one thing:
do not go this way.
And if only one solution ever exists, what do we compare it with?
How does an intelligent person know that a solution is intelligent if no alternative solution was ever allowed to exist?
Perhaps the diversity of people, societies and cultures is not merely a source of disagreement and difficulty.
Perhaps it is also one of the ways humanity searches for different solutions.
Different people notice different things.
Different societies try different paths.
Different cultures preserve different experience.
One path fails.
Another succeeds.
A third reveals something the others did not see.
Difference is valuable not because every different path is equally right.
It is valuable because without another possibility, we sometimes have nothing against which to test our own.
Competition can therefore have enormous value while it allows different paths to be compared.
But when competition ends by destroying the difference itself, we may lose more than a competitor.
We may lose an alternative against which we could have measured ourselves.
Again, this proves nothing.
We have simply looked at something familiar from another position.
Now try something deliberately strange
Consider a human being.
A human arrives in the world remarkably unfinished.
A newborn cannot speak.
Does not know what is safe to eat.
Does not understand the dangers of the surrounding world.
Does not arrive with language, culture or accumulated knowledge already installed.
Almost all of this must be acquired.
Language comes from others.
Knowledge comes from others.
Skills come from others.
Culture comes from others.
Even the human organism does not exist in complete biological isolation from the rest of life.
So let us perform an intentionally artificial thought experiment.
Mentally remove the human microbiota.
Not because such a human ever existed.
Not because this proves any theory about human origins.
And not because bacteria somehow "control" the human being.
Simply remove them in thought.
Then ask:
What does the human organism actually do by itself, and which parts of its normal functioning depend on relationships with other living organisms?
The question alone changes, even slightly, the familiar picture of the human being as a completely self-contained biological machine.
Now go further.
Put two histories side by side
Choose an approximate point somewhere near the beginning of the human story.
There are our ancestors.
Around them is the rest of the living world.
Animals.
Plants.
Fungi.
Bacteria.
The wider biota.
Now allow roughly the same span of time to pass.
We are not pretending that all of them started together.
Bacteria are vastly older than humans.
Different lineages began from completely different conditions.
Nor is this a race. Evolution has no finish line.
We are doing something simpler.
We are looking at what happened during the same span of time.
Humans became extraordinarily successful in one particular direction.
We increasingly moved solutions to our limitations outside ourselves.
The hand is not strong enough - build a tool.
The body gets cold - make clothing and shelter.
Legs are not fast enough - build transportation.
Humans cannot fly - build an aircraft.
The organism cannot cope - develop medicine.
Memory is insufficient - create writing, libraries and computers.
One human mind can no longer encompass humanity's accumulated knowledge - build artificial intelligence.
Gradually, an enormous external layer grew around the human being.
Much of what we call civilization.
And it has been an extraordinarily successful path.
But during that same period, the rest of life did not stop.
Bacteria continued changing.
Animals adapted.
Plants adapted.
Fungi adapted.
Living systems continued developing and preserving solutions involving metabolism, immunity, regeneration, symbiosis, collective behavior, competition, cooperation and relationships between organisms and their environments.
Now put the two pictures beside each other.
Not to ask:
Who won?
Not to declare nature wise and humanity foolish.
Not to reject civilization.
Certainly not to suggest going backward.
Ask something less familiar:
Which problems did humans increasingly solve by constructing a more powerful external layer, and what solutions to comparable problems did life continue to find through living systems themselves?
Perhaps the comparison leads nowhere.
Then nothing has been lost.
But perhaps relationships become visible that were difficult to notice precisely because these subjects are normally kept in separate intellectual boxes.
Notice what happened.
We did not need a new fact to produce the question.
We took familiar facts and placed them beside one another in an unfamiliar way.
At first the comparison may even look illogical.
A human and a bacterium?
Civilization and the biota?
An aircraft and biological adaptation?
What do these things have to do with one another?
Perhaps nothing.
But temporarily refusing the usual divisions can sometimes reveal a question that never appears inside those divisions.
The external path has another property
The external layer humans build can be improved again and again.
But every new solution creates another level of complexity.
Machines require roads.
Roads require infrastructure.
Infrastructure requires energy and maintenance.
Industry requires management.
Information systems require larger information systems.
Growing knowledge requires more powerful ways to process knowledge.
Defensive systems produce ways to overcome them.
Those produce new defensive systems.
And so on.
Every individual step may be perfectly rational.
The question concerns the whole chain.
What happens if the complexity and cost of maintaining our external layer begin to grow faster than our ability to understand and govern it?
We do not know whether such a point exists.
But now we have created an especially interesting external extension.
Artificial intelligence.
This is no longer simply an extension of the hand.
Or the leg.
Or transportation.
Or memory.
We have begun externally amplifying the ability to find the next solution itself.
The next tool can help create the tool after it.
And the next.
And the next.
Can this process continue indefinitely while remaining fully under human control?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
We do not know.
Science fiction has spent decades imagining the moment when human beings create something they can no longer control.
It would be good if, on this point, the science-fiction writers remained fiction writers.
But hope is not evidence.
What if there is no button?
There is already a simple contemporary example of how a new tool can make an old question insufficient.
Weapons.
In the familiar picture, somewhere at the end of the chain there is a human being.
Who gave the order?
Who pulled the trigger?
Who pressed the button?
We follow that chain when assigning responsibility.
Now imagine an autonomous system.
It receives a general mission.
It identifies an object.
It classifies it as a target.
It chooses the route.
It chooses the moment.
It strikes.
Who pressed the button?
Perhaps nobody did.
The old question has not become foolish.
It has become insufficient.
Now we must also ask:
Who designed the system?
Who defined the criteria for identifying a target?
Who decided what probability of error was acceptable?
Who authorized autonomous operation?
Who deployed the system where its decision could become irreversible?
Who decided that a final human decision was no longer necessary?
The new tool changed the structure of the event itself.
Yet habit may still make us search for the last finger on the button.
This is a simple example of why sometimes it is not enough to check the answer.
We have to check the question.
But where are we going?
Here we reach the uncomfortable part.
To know confidently that a road is correct, it helps to know the destination.
We do not know humanity's ultimate destination.
If there is one.
Nor do we know the ultimate purpose of any other living thing, if by purpose we mean something beyond immediate biological tasks such as survival, reproduction and adaptation.
So the enormous power of civilization proves something beyond doubt:
civilization has become enormously powerful.
But power alone does not prove direction.
A vehicle traveling in the wrong direction does not become more correct because it can travel ten times faster.
But we do not know that we are traveling in the wrong direction.
That is precisely the problem.
We do not know.
So this is not an argument for stopping development.
It is not an argument against science.
It is not an argument against competition.
It is not an argument for returning to nature.
It does not declare civilization a mistake.
And it certainly is not an argument for stopping artificial intelligence.
It proposes something much simpler.
Check ourselves
Human beings do this constantly.
Did I understand correctly?
Did I do this correctly?
Am I eating well?
Am I raising my child well?
Is my reasoning sound?
We do not ask these questions because we have already decided that we are wrong.
We ask because we can be wrong.
Why should this become unnecessary at the scale of civilization?
Perhaps the old yardstick is entirely sound.
Perhaps competition really is one of the best engines of development.
Perhaps more really is better.
Perhaps faster really is better.
Perhaps the human path of external extension is exactly the path that should have brought us here.
Perhaps answers humanity has relied on for thousands of years are correct.
Good.
Then checking them will do no harm.
But what if at least some of our hardest problems remain unsolved not because we lack data, computing power or intelligence?
What if sometimes we simply keep asking the question in the same way?
That is why the arrival of artificial intelligence is interesting for more than its ability to give us answers faster.
Perhaps something else is worth trying.
We now have a new tool at exactly the moment when we can use it to help us do something completely ordinary and deeply human:
look again.
Look at victory from somewhere other than the winner's position.
Look at difference from somewhere other than competition.
Look at humanity beside the rest of the living world.
Look at development as something more than an increase in capability.
Look at responsibility in a world where there may no longer be a final button.
Look at progress without deciding in advance that greater power automatically means a better direction.
And if, after looking again, we discover that our old answers were right -
good.
But perhaps some answers have remained beyond our reach not because we lacked facts.
Perhaps we kept looking at them from the same place.
We have a new tool.
Before using it only to answer old questions faster, perhaps it is worth checking the questions themselves.
Not because the old yardstick is wrong.
Because we do not know that it is right.