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Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology; director, Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania; author, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
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“My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing,” William James said, and it’s important to remember what kind of thinking people actually do, in what contexts we do it, and why we do it. And then to compare these with what machines might someday do.
Humans spend between 25 and 50 percent of our mental lives prospecting the future. We imagine a host of possible outcomes, and we imbue most, perhaps each, of these prospects with a valence. What comes next is crucial: We choose to enact one of the options. We needn’t get entangled in the problems of free will for present purposes; all we need to acknowledge is that our thinking in service of doing entails imagining a set of possible futures and assigning a value to each. The act of choosing, however it’s managed, translates our thinking into doing.
Why is thinking structured this way? Because people have many competing goals (eating, sex, sleeping, tennis, writing articles, complimenting, revenge, child care, tanning, etc.) and a scarcity of resources for carrying them out—scarcity of time, money, and effort, and even the prospect of death. So evaluative simulation of possible futures is one of our solutions to this economy. This is a mechanism that prioritizes and selects what we will do.
It’s not just external resources that are scarce. Thinking itself uses up costly and limited energy and so relies heavily on shortcuts and barely justified leaps to the best explanation. Our actual thinking is woefully inefficient: The mind wanders, intrusions rise unbidden, attention is continually only partial. Thinking rarely engages the exhausting processes of reasoning, deliberating, and deducing.
The context of much of our thinking is social. Yes, we can deploy thinking to solve physical problems and crunch numbers, but the anlage, as Nick Humphreys reminds us, is other people. We use our thinking to do socially: to compete, to cooperate, to convene the courtroom of the mind, to spin and to persuade.
I don’t know much about the workings of our current machines. I don’t believe they do anything, in James’s sense of voluntary action. I doubt they prospect possible futures, evaluate them, and choose among them, although perhaps this describes—for only a single, simple goal—what chess-playing computers do. Our current machines are constrained by available space and electricity bills, but they’re not primarily creations of scarcity, with clamorously competing goals and extremely limited energy. Our current machines aren’t social: They don’t compete or cooperate with one another or with humans, they don’t spin, and they don’t attempt to persuade.
I know even less about what machines might someday do. I imagine, however, that a machine could be built with the following properties:
• It prospects and evaluates possible futures;
• It has competing goals and selects among competing actions and competing goals using those evaluations;
• It has scarce resources and so must forgo some goals, actions, and options for processing, and so it uses shortcuts;
• It’s social: It competes or cooperates with other machines or with humans; it spins and it attempts to persuade people.
That kind of machine would warrant discussion of whether it has civil rights, whether it has feelings, or whether it’s dangerous or even a source of great hope.
