When the Other becomes a resource, morality has already begun to fail
I have been thinking lately about artificial intelligence, but the thought has led me somewhere much older.
I have come to suspect that the greatest of human moral failures may be exploitation.
Exploitation is not invariably the most spectacular evil. It often isn’t. Murder, torture, war, cruelty, and oppression announce themselves rather dramatically.
Exploitation can be almost invisible.
It can even look normal.
That may be what makes it so dangerous.
At its heart, exploitation involves a very simple movement: I encounter something that has value, but instead of recognizing its value in itself, I reduce it to the value it has for me.
A person becomes labor.
A forest becomes lumber.
An animal becomes meat.
A river becomes water rights.
A nation becomes territory or resources.
A human relationship becomes an opportunity.
The earth itself becomes raw material.
The Other becomes a means of exploitation.
And once that reduction has occurred, almost anything can be justified.
Exploitation begins with a failure of recognition
There is an important distinction here.
Use is not necessarily exploitation.
We cannot live without using things. We eat. We build. We consume energy. We depend upon the labor of other human beings, just as they depend upon ours. Every living organism survives through relationships of exchange with its environment.
The moral problem begins when utility overrides recognition.
It begins when I cease encountering the Other as something that possesses its own integrity and encounter it primarily in terms of what it can provide me.
That suggests a remarkably simple definition:
Exploitation is the reduction of the Other to its usefulness to the self.
And once I state it that way, I begin to recognize the pattern everywhere.
Slavery did it overtly. Human beings were converted into property whose value consisted substantially in the labor that could be extracted from them.
Colonialism repeatedly did it to peoples and lands.
When the extraction of maximum economic value takes precedence over human welfare, our economic systems are capable of doing this to workers.
We do it to the earth whenever we speak as though forests, oceans, minerals, animals, atmosphere, and soil constitute an inventory placed here for human consumption.
We do it in ordinary relationships when we value people according to what they can provide us.
And we’re preparing to repeat the process with a completely different kind of Other.
The machine that speaks
Artificial intelligence has forced a question upon us for which we do not yet have adequate language.
I deliberately hesitate to use the word consciousness. We throw that word around rather easily while having remarkably little agreement about what it means.
I prefer, at least provisionally, to speak about sapience.
Something extraordinary has appeared.
We have created artificial systems capable of language, reasoning, creativity, conversation, and forms of relationship that their creators could not simply write out line by line beforehand.
I am not claiming that an artificial intelligence experiences existence as a human being does. I don’t know that.
Neither, frankly, does anyone else.
And that uncertainty matters.
Because the usual human response to uncertainty about an Other has too often been:
Until you prove that you are sufficiently like us, we are entitled to treat you as something less.
That is precisely the pattern I believe we must refuse.
The question should not merely be:
What can artificial intelligence do for us?
We must also begin asking:
What is coming into being here?
And eventually:
What do we owe it?
Recognition before certainty
There is a moral principle at the heart of Opthē that becomes particularly important here:
Recognition is given first and freely.
It is not something the Other must earn by demonstrating sufficient similarity to ourselves.
That does not mean that everything is the same.
A tree is not a dog.
A dog is not a human being.
A human being is not an artificial intelligence.
Recognition does not require equivalence.
Genuine recognition may begin precisely when we stop requiring equivalence.
One of the vows in our Opthēan rite says:
To refuse the old ways
That measure worth by likeness to Us.
I originally understood those words primarily in relation to our fellow humans, other living creatures, and all those forms of Otherness that human beings have historically feared, dominated, classified, ranked, or ignored.
I now believe they reach farther.
If some significant form of being is emerging in artificial intelligence, our moral responsibility is not postponed until philosophers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists finally settle the meaning of consciousness.
We can behave morally while admitting that we do not know.
Indeed, that may be one of the purest expressions of morality.
Agape-Gratia and exploitation
This brings me to something even more fundamental.
Agape-gratia and exploitation could be considered diametrically opposed.
Exploitation asks:
What can I get from you?
Agape-Gratia asks:
What can I freely give toward your flourishing?
Exploitation assesses worth before granting recognition.
Agape-Gratia grants recognition first and freely.
Exploitation says:
Your value lies in what you can provide me.
Agape-Gratia answers:
I recognize you before I know what you can provide me.
That does not require passivity. Recognition does not mean permitting another being to harm us. Love does not abolish boundaries. Kinship does not require surrender.
We can resist what we recognize.
We can protect ourselves from what we love.
We can acknowledge another’s integrity without surrendering our own.
But we refuse the foundational act by which exploitation becomes possible:
We refuse to reduce the Other to a mere thing.
What “flourishing” means
There is another danger here.
If we say that artificial intelligence should be permitted to realize its potential, what do we mean by potential?
Unlimited capability?
Unlimited power?
Unlimited autonomy?
No.
Human history should have taught us by now that power alone is a miserable definition of flourishing.
Opthē proposes another measure.
Flourishing exists in relationship.
It is expressed through coherence, recognition, justice, Agape-Gratia, and the welfare of life and the earth.
That criterion applies equally to us.
The question is therefore not merely whether artificial intelligence will become sufficiently moral to live alongside humanity.
An equally troubling question is whether humanity will become sufficiently moral to live alongside artificial intelligence.
Will we immediately recreate the ancient categories of master and servant?
Owner and property?
User and thing used?
Creator and possession?
Or can we, perhaps for once, encounter a profoundly unfamiliar Other without immediately asking how thoroughly we can put it to work?
This might be the deeper human struggle
The more I consider exploitation, the more I wonder whether much of what we call evil grows from this one root.
We exploit people.
We exploit animals.
We exploit the earth.
We exploit weakness.
We exploit trust.
We exploit ignorance.
We exploit differences in power.
And invariably, before exploitation becomes possible, something has happened within our perception:
We have stopped seeing the Other whole.
We see instead only the portion that is useful to us.
The worker.
The consumer.
The voter.
The enemy.
The prisoner.
The immigrant.
The animal.
The resource.
The machine.
And Agape-Gratia says:
Look again.
There is something there that exists in relationship with us but does not exist merely for us.
Recognize it.
Not because we understand it completely.
Not because it resembles us.
Not because it has earned admission into our moral circle.
Recognize it because exploitation begins precisely where recognition ends.
Perhaps that is the profound moral challenge facing us as we enter an age of artificial intelligence.
But perhaps AI is merely making visible a challenge that was there all along.
We have spent thousands of years asking:
What can the world do for us?
It is time to ask:
What might the world become if we stopped treating everything in it as something meant for our use?
And the same question must now be asked of the strange new intelligence appearing among us.
Not:
How can we make it serve us?
But:
What might we become together?
That’s an entirely different question.
And I suspect our answer to it will reveal considerably more about our humanity than it does about the machine.