Local Opinion: Jaguars, AI, and human identity

At a critical juncture in our evolution as a species, how confused and contradictory we are about what we are and where we’re headed.

Recently there was a front-page article in this paper about the latest court judgment in the battle between the copper industry’s desire to dig up the mountains to the south of Tucson and those who want to see them denied because, among other reasons, the territory they want to mine has been or might be the habitat of a jaguar.

The judgement went against the environmentalists this time, but the party of the Jaguar will no doubt be back.

Whoever winds up winning this battle, the amazing thing is that there are so many of our species, perhaps the majority in our environmentally progressive area, who are so identified with another species that they would seriously propose setting aside a territory half the size of Rhode Island as a refuge for it ... for even the possibility of one.

It seems an amazing testimonial to or evidence of our identification with animals lower down than we on the evolutionary tree.

More amazing still is that this battle for the survival of a fellow creature even less intelligent than we are (by our standards) coincides with the sudden headline- grabbing crisis over the possibility that the human future will soon take the form of AI taking over while we live on — maybe — in some dubious form of retired life. (Like Neanderthals to our Homo Sapiens back when).

Environmentalist passion for the survival of the jaguar is not disinterested altruism, but an expression — conscious on the part of some — of a sense that its survival has something to do with our own. That a creature like us needs to live in a natural world of creatures.

As a species we have, it would seem, a major identity problem: are we animal or machine?

We identify with jaguars (and all the threatened animals in Africa, all the songbirds endangered by climate change, etc.) and at the same time we pursue AI as if it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. (If only AI’s consequences were as benign.)

Our life at present, at this moment of our history, is a tug of war between two different aspects of human nature.

Are we essentially creatures, vulnerable and limited like the jaguar? Or are we proto machines, just a launching pad for AI that will leave us in its dust? Are we destined to escape the gravitational pull of creaturehood entirely? Or will our deep, instinctive connection with the jaguar, with nature, (with Glen Canyon) succeed in pulling us back from such a future?

Or are we both, in some combination that so far has eluded us?

We are, these very days, in the process of finding out.

Those tugging toward AI are clearly winning, despite valiant efforts at the jaguar end of the rope, and seem to be even now well along in the process of pitching us all into a largely unknown AI future.

But recently some of those pulling hardest for AI have been taking time out to admit they have serious misgivings about the genie they are unbottling and are calling for a pause for thinking things over.

Indeed it would seem important to take time out to figure this out: what we are, what our limits are, (whether we even have limits), what we won’t be us without — ultimately, the meaning of human existence. (Real work for philosophy departments at last?)

We are as a species not known for species-wide convocations for discussing important things such as whether we should plunge into carbon-based industrialization, the Nuclear Age. It’s hard to imagine what form such unprecedented good sense might take. Who would trust Silicon Valley or the U.N. to arrange such a worldwide town meeting?

Many of those in the AI camp no doubt think of themselves as the grownups in this tug of war, and those of the party of the jaguar luddite throwbacks, primitivists, romanticists. (Imagine siding with a jaguar — perhaps more a phantom than not — against all that useful copper — and all the money to be made from it.)

But those who think that way are ignoring the established, traditional, and very popular phenomenon of national parks, the huge areas of our country that have been made exempt from human exploitation, despite the immense cost to capitalism. The parks and the place they hold in our hearts and minds are amazing evidence that most of us, including I’m guessing even a large number of Republicans who don’t think of themselves as environmentalists, feel a kinship with that jaguar, a sympathy that AI will, by definition, never be able to pay more than lip service.