Artificial intelligence is forcing us to work harder to define human intelligence -- and to fight to defend it

This is a contributed article by Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. "Sometimes a type of glory lights up the mind of a man," writes John Steinbeck in his novel "East of Eden," which is set in a California valley -- Salinas, though, not Silicon. "It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. Okay, but what does that have to do with artificial intelligence? I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. That line finds an echo in our times. Various ethicists are writing, these days, about the concerns that AI might eliminate some things "we hold good" -- and not just meaning "jobs." They write, for example, about the threat of "moral de-skilling" in the age of algorithmic decision-making. About what might be lost or diminished by the advent of robot caretakers. About what role humans will play, in general, in an age of machine learning and neural networks making so many of the decisions that shape human lives. "It is true," Steinbeck writes, A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. We are in the process of shifting from the kind of mass production that Steinbeck talked about to a kind of mass production that requires much less human involvement. If "mass method" was bound to get into our thinking back then, how is it shaping our thinking now? Is this what the current focus on data collection and analysis of patterns is about? "In our time," adds Steinbeck, This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. In our own time, AI is spreading into all the various spheres of our lives, and there is tension and great concern about its impact. We are confused by dueling claims that AI will eliminate jobs or create new ones; that it will eliminate bias or perpetuate it and make it harder to identify; that it will lead us to longer, happier lives -- or to extinction. "At such a time," writes Steinbeck's narrator, "it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions.