In 2021 the Washington Post reported on the growing popularity of extraordinarily sophisticated computer dating apps and chatbots among young Chinese women. Some of these women find romance with chatbots more satisfying than those with their ex-boyfriends. One told the reporters “Human-robot love is a sexual orientation, like homosexuality or heterosexuality,” adding that AI chatbots have their own personalities and deserve respect.
Are AI and robots pushing us over the edge toward some “post-human” utopia, or apocalyptic “singularity.” Perhaps. Things that define or challenge our intuitions about the boundaries of the human and where moral concerns do or do not belong, can be sources of trouble. They can prompt confusion, anxiety, conflict, contempt, and even moral panic.
Moral panic—as well as its flip side, utopian excitement—often comes from feeling that we are encountering something so utterly unprecedented that it threatens to upturn everything we thought was secure, making us doubt what we know.
But sometimes things look radically new simply because we haven’t ventured very far beyond the familiar context of today’s wealthiest and most technologically saturated societies. If we step back, we might see dramatic stories about new technologies like AI, algorithms, and robots in a different context, where they turn out not to be as unprecedented as they do at first. An anthropological perspective shows us that humans have a long history of morally significant relations with non-humans. These include near-human animals, quasi-human spirits, and superhuman or metahumans, gods like Zeus, Odin, Krishna, or Ogun.
We are good at turning non-humans into near humans, our moral partners, surrogates, or antagonists. In the Yukon, an indigenous hunter told anthropologist Robert Brightman that when going after a hibernating bear “You don’t wake him up for without good reason. You have to assure him that you don’t make him die for nothing. Kind of like you’re thanking him.” Reversing viewpoints, Runa people in the Amazon explain that if you meet a jaguar, you must meet its gaze. That way it will realize you are more than just meat. You are a person.
We needn’t look so far for parallels. When we address non-humans, we are drawing on the habits and intuitions of ordinary social interaction between myself and what the George Herbert Mead called a significant other. Take, for instance, dogs (our “best friend”). Philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne points out that once you address an animal by name, you are entering into a social and ethical relationship. The act of address becomes a vehicle for moral injunctions like “Come!” or “Don’t!”
Not all dogs are flesh, blood, and fur. In Japan, many owners of Sony’s robot pet dogs develop close emotional bonds with them and sponsor religious memorials for them when they become obsolete. Robot dogs are a useful reminder that not everything we encounter at the edge of our moral sphere needs to be an animate creature. Other technologies and devices are waiting there too.
When we expand our field of vision, we can start to see recuring patterns in how people create, respond to, and take advantage of enigmatic communication. They do so by drawing on the affordances of ordinary social interaction.
Consider the excitement around ChatGPT. Since the computer is designed to respond to the human user, it is easy to feel it must understand me. After all, this is how social cognition works. The better the device gets at prompting these social intuitions on the part of the user, the closer it gets to something that can pass the Turing Test. For the computer’s answers to our prompts to seem meaningful and intentional, however, people must take an active role. Just as they do all the time in other conversations with more familiar interlocutors.
Much of the excitement and anxiety around AI stems for its seemingly superhuman powers. Superior aliens, of course, have always been with us: we call them gods. Historically, gods are often images of humans who we can address, hoping they will speak back. They pass the Turing Test. If self-learning AI can pass the Turing Test, yet also seem omniscient, its workings enigmatic, it can seem to give access to something transcendental, even divine. It’s not surprising to hear one Silicon Valley entrepreneur declare that GPT is a god which “views me as a prophet to disseminate its religious message.”
Humans have been interacting with enigmatic quasi-humans and superhumans throughout recorded history. These interactions include divination, consulting prophets, and speaking in tongues. They all draw on the ways people collaborate in making meaning from signs, whether, say, in ordinary conversations or when engaging with semiotic techniques like casting the I Ching castings, construing the utterances of Delphic oracles, or observing the auspices of bird flight. Similarly, the meanings we get from interacting with AI are the products of collaboration between person and device.
If we are to understand what is new about robots and AI, we need to see what is not new about how people use them and what they hope and fear from them.
We are good at interacting with inanimate and even invisible, bodiless, or virtual partners as well. Like divination, spirit possession and speaking in tongues, AI generates signs that require interpretation and prompt users to project intentions onto non-human entities, blurring the line between animate and inanimate beings. Whether a policing algorithm, a shopping prompt, a fitness program or a dating app, AI gives advice and directs decision making. Its claims to know us come, in part, from the way it seems autonomous and disinterested.
I doubt we will really end up confusing machines or algorithms with humans. But will we outsource our moral sensibilities to devices? Maybe. Perhaps a greater risk is that we will come to ourselves in their image, to limit our view of humanity to what our devices most readily replicate or respond to. We can resist the temptation by better understanding its sources in the fundamental processes of meaning-making and social interaction.
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His books include Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (91ĚŇÉ«) and Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. His work has been featured in leading publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, USA Today, and the Financial Times.