When the Machine Thinks, Man Feels

Just over a hundred years ago there wasn't even a car. Nor electric light.

This is the speed of reason. Of invention. Of technology.

And feelings?

Human feelings are approximately the same, even from ten thousand years ago.

This introduction serves to propose that reason has endless curiosity, while emotions are essentially the same.

This proposition helps predict where artificial intelligence might push us: (back) to our emotions. No?

In Retirement of Reason I propose that AI will predominantly replace our rational side - literally the left side of the brain. Leaving room for the other side, the side connected to our feelings, sensations, emotions, to (return to) shine.

Daniel Siegel teaches us that both sides of the brain are important, which is why the thick corpus callosum connects both sides of the brain.

Through synapses in the corpus callosum, emotions plus reason come into balance, obtaining from the whole the characteristics of complex systems: adaptability, flexibility (etc).

We could simplify that acting only on the right side tends to chaos, tantrums, outbursts, those road rage fights that the person only regrets later (etc).

We can also simplify that acting only on the left side tends to rigidity, with distant coldness, lists and lists, analysis and analysis, without decision, without impulse.

If AI truly replaces our need to use the left side, the side of reason, of the brain, can we become unbalanced?

It's a good question.

A hypothesis that occurs to me is that we are already using the left side of the brain too much and the right side—of emotions, sensations, feelings—too little. Daniel Siegel himself advocates this in some of his books. Gelong Thubten, an English monk, also describes this, I feel.

If this hypothesis holds water, then AI will be helping to rebalance our complex machine of reason plus emotion.

I will now digress about endless reason - and finite emotion.

I feel that our reason side never stops inventing things. That's why in just over a hundred years we have invented so much technology. Meanwhile, our emotions remain the same: joy, sadness, fear, anger (etc).

We can invent varied social arrangements to deal with these same emotions: arranged marriages, romantic love. Monogamy, polygamy (etc).

But these arrangements essentially seek to deal with the same emotions.

If AI unbalances our ability to use both the left and right sides of the brain, leaning toward using the right side too much, replacing the use of the left side with AIs, we might tend toward chaos, from the point of view of complex systems analysis.

Tantrums, uncontrolled emotions, and similar behaviors will no longer have the balance of reason quite as much.

Could we tend toward chaos?

And before AI, if we are indeed overly rational, are we then, before AI, tending toward rigidity, with excessive use of reason to the detriment of feelings and emotion?

In Brave New World, a tribe that does not submit to new technologies - like the Amish in the USA, roughly - would be a way to show that emotion does not need technology, I propose this interpretation. If we connect with our emotions and feelings, we could still be barefoot in the forest for another gazillion years (until the sun goes out).

Already exploring our ability to rationalize, to invent technologies, there is never an end: we will always want to discover more planets and smaller things that the best microscope of the era displays to us. Tirelessly.

I think I should start thinking about these matters, thinking a bit about us, the world, with these tools and the viewpoint of reason and emotion.

For now, I'm just spreading the tools on the table.

Inconclusive! Still.