Causing quite a stir, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta’s CEO) recently proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) companionship for those suffering from social isolation. All of this unfolds amid a climate of epidemic-levels of loneliness, as declared by the Surgeon General, and the storms it has unleashed upon the edifices of our personal and collective health. The irony, even horror, was not lost on many: The very tools and companies, in large part, culpable for the crisis of loneliness are now being rebranded as the cures. It’s a dystopian twist that may well cause even Orwell to balk.
With each day heralding new advancements in AI technology, and with it, ever more intrusion into our daily lives, the questions of the ethics governing its use and developments become that much more urgent and necessary.
What realm of human endeavor should remain untouched, let alone replaced, by AI?
Can perhaps the most quintessential of human yearning (meaningful connection) become outsourced to these machines?
When do these machines cease simply to be tools but the proverbial masters in our lives?
The pandemic’s lessons on virtual connection
The evidence on the effects of these technologies on our mental and social health mounts each day, and not in its favor. Inadvertently, and much to our chagrin, COVID-era policies furnish a control experiment on what can happen when video, screens, and virtual interaction are widely adopted in place of real, in-person connection. The results of these policies on our children, no less, the most precious of our population, do not bode well in favor of such transition.
In a blow to national academic performance, students at all grade levels have reported worsening test scores in all major learning domains since the pandemic’s disruptions to our learning environments. It was not only learning outcomes that suffered: Emotional health and interpersonal skills deteriorated as well. All of this indicating the indispensable value of face-to-face, in-person learning, and connection.
Much has already been written on the effects of social media itself on our mental health. Now AI has been added to this already toxic concoction. New dysmorphic and dystopian-sounding conditions as “AI psychosis” have arisen, which show these tools rather than relieving have in many cases reinforced mental health woes for the worse.
The question must then be asked: why would we invite more intrusion of these technologies in our lives? Should we not look upon with skepticism as these tools are now being paradoxically proposed as solutions to the very crises that they helped foment?
Transhumanism: a disturbing progression of AI technology
These trends of technological, and now AI, ubiquity foreshadow the coming of a larger movement (transhumanism) which purports to not merely supplement but rather supplant essential human functions with technology.
With the breathtaking and historic pace of private capital and government assistance flowing into AI coffers, these trends show no signs of the slow and thoughtful introspection befitting the profound consequences they portend.
We, in medicine, must make that clarion call for caution and conscience. We, in medicine, recognize our roles as unlike any other vocation but among the highest and privileged of callings, and the ultimate aims of human well-being as more than just the function of molecules and equations but rather a deeply personal process.
In the words of Dr. Faith Fitzgerald, a personal and beloved mentor, “Medicine is a human endeavor that uses science only as a tool.”
By this, we recognize the human being, as far more than the sum of their parts: above and beyond, mere by-products of chemical reactions and rudimentary pattern-recognition to be predicted, altered, and managed. Therefore, our deepest yearnings (of which connection ranks immeasurably high) cannot and must not be reduced to proprietary algorithms and machine-learning to somehow decipher and treat.
The ethics of AI: peril and hope
As AI invariably enters into yet more intimate domains of our lives, these difficult yet existential dilemmas must be examined and principles established.
When mankind entered yet another equally perilous age with the advent of nuclear weapons, that epoch’s most illustrious figure, Albert Einstein, warned, “You can have the ethical foundations of science. You cannot have the scientific foundations of ethics.”
At that time, also of momentous reckoning, the very symbol of science himself, Einstein, believed guidance (the ethical foundations) to how these technologies were used and advanced must not come from science or scientists alone but in collaboration with those outside the field.
This work then must involve all of us from different disciplines and sectors united in concern and responsibility for what the future of health and community looks like with such radically-altering instruments now in our midst.
The late Jonathan Sacks added to this sentiment adroitly writing, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”
Thus, scholars of religion, and the humanities more broadly, offer an integral role in restoring a sense of “wholeness” amid this age of dizzying and disintegrating change, drawing upon the timeless wisdom of their traditions to answer those perennial questions of human dignity, meaning, and flourishing for us in our own time.
And we, in medicine (who serve at that unique and hallowed nexus of the humanities and science, the spiritual and biological, the personal and technical) must be at the forefront in shaping the role, scope, and purpose of this technology when, as it does, so profoundly concern both the inner and outer lives of our people and patients.
Mohammed Umer Waris is a family physician.
