AI is doing several things that humans can do. In fact that there are alarm bells run that ring to foretell that jobs will shrink in the future as more and more they will be taken by AI. They are fast replicating previously human-only skills and are simulating human intelligence. Will, they make us humans redundant. The real issue in this contest is to ask: can AI take up creative arts. Can AI write a play/ drama? The first play written by AI shows that we are far away from the generation of creative art by AI. The first play written by AI is called ‘AI: when a Robot writes a play’. This has demonstrated that AI can take up previously human-only skills and competencies. The play shows that AI can develop the dialogue between two characters but offers very little for narrative and character development. The reviews of the play say that AI has not yet developed potentials to the point of human creative playwrights. But there is a growing possibility that of convergence of Art and technology. With the growth of AI, we do not just have technology surrounding us but we are fast facing body technology interface driven by AI. AI will elicit, produce and replicate highly sophisticated knowledge of our bodily life and health. AI is transforming our living spaces. The face recognition technology of AI is giving us new freedoms as well as rendering us vulnerable. In fact, big data analytics will know us more intimately than we know ourselves.
With the rapid growth of AI, the future is coming into our present more quickly than ever before. The Internet of things has revolutionized data collection. Everything is digitized. We are liviging into Phigital world. AI is going to transform the experience of the world. It will impact Transportation, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media, Customer Service and Education. It offers us possibilities of optimizing and hence is all set to bring efficiency, multitasking and profitability into the above ventures. But there are drawbacks too. AI is still low on creativity and compassion. The fact that it does not make unimaginative mistakes that are characteristics of a human, AI cannot fully simulate human beings. Although AI exceeds humans in several fields. The fact that it seeks optimization and efficiency, it will not be able to fail fantastically and unpredictably as humans do. The growing AI has several challenges. Privacy rights as well Human rights are going to be put in danger. Some AI enthusiasts are already proclaiming the coming of AGI (artificial, general intelligence). Alarm bells have begun to ring with naysayers predicting disaster for humanity, claiming that such a superintelligence would be an existential threat to humanity. How powerful humans may use AGI does build anxieties among thinkers about the impact of technology. Hence we have the challenge to develop an ethical response to this fast-changing world. The rapid changing reality does not give us time to reflect and respond. We have to respond on our feet so to say to this rapidly growing and transforming the world.
The ethical response has to generate phronesis. To come to respond emancipative, we are challenged to embrace thinking that I call dorsal thinking. To come to dorsality of our thinking we have to understand the limitations of our habitual frontal thinking and embrace integral thinking that will embrace the figures of thought taught by Michel Serres. Figures of thought belong upstream while language and meaning belong downstream of our thinking. Figures of thought assist us to enter our thinking before thoughts are dressed in language and abstracted from emotions and bodily content. We are interacting with the world generated by artificial intelligence beyond the cloak of language. Our responses cannot be simply caged in language. Language seems to disembody flesh. Language territorializes and freezes our interactions with the world. There is an asemiotic dimension to our experience and response. It is bodily and sensory. We have to factor in that. We stand in-between people, things and events. This being in-between is dynamic. We as in-between are influenced as well as we influence the reality that surrounds us. Being in-between, relationality is central to us. Our responses, therefore, are also in-between. They impact us as well as things and events. Everything breathes through relations and hence is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. That is why the disorder is everywhere. But this disorder generated order. Serres uses the notion of noise to illustrate this point. Hence, to offer an adequate response, we have to think with the figure of thought of Serres
The figure of thoughts, therefore, are not merely semantic in character. They are connecting life in all its complexity. Christopher Watkins indicates that there are eight characteristics to the figures of thought:
1. Operators: They are receiving, storing and processing information
2. Natural: They are not abstract but belong to nature
3. Inventions: They open possibilities for novelty and open new rhythms of thought
4. Bodily: they are not just mental but are carnal and connect the movements and emotions of the body
5. Narrative: they can embody a story
6. Named: they are connecting the local with the global and the general with the particular
7. Synthetic: they connect the worlds that they profess, communicate and promote
8. Living: they carry the effervesce of life
The figures of thought can provide new vantage points to invent creative and emancipative responses to the world. They invite us to focus on productive hermeneutics. We have to challenge to direct productive hermeneutics to expand rather than narrow the human experience of life. We have tried to think creatively and inventively outside the existing structures of thoughts and embrace new ways of being in the world critically and responsibly while we mediate the world of artificial intelligence.