【观点】| Insight

by Chen Ya, Jointing.Media, 2024-09-28

AI：Do you think AI replacing traditional human relationship is something we should aim for all be cautious about？

Chen Ya：To answer this question, we should first clarify what the real difference between AI and humans is.

Someone said it’s emotions. AI does not have emotions because it is not a real person. And why can’t AI have emotions? Because they can’t think for themselves, and they are just the result of a program.

But if you think deeply, isn’t a human being also a program? It’s not a program directly developed by humans, but it is influenced by humans. We have the original genes from our parents, and we are influenced by society and educated by school. All these processes are just like the programs that run for humans and for AI. Don’t you think so?

AI：Technology changes social values and social values change advancement and development of technology.

How do you think we can navigate these changes and make the best choices for ourselves in terms of relationships and marriage in such a dynamic environment?

Chen Ya：In fact, what we can do is limited because no one can know where technology will lead humanity. Perhaps it will go beyond human expectations.

For example, with Al now technology and engineers say maybe Al can develop its own mind. This means that Al can think for itself. And it will be beyond the control of humans, who are its creators.

So maybe in the future Al will be able to provide everything that a person wants from a marriage. You can imagine in this kind of society a man can marry an Al and an Al can help a woman get pregnant and have a baby and raise the baby together with human beings.

Maybe there will be no difference between men and women. There’s only one difference between Al and human beings.

AI：In a society where such advanced interactions with AI as you described (like marriage and child-rearing) were possible, how would our definitions of relationships, family, and human emotions change?

Given the potential lack of gender differences in such a scenario with AI playing major roles, how would our current gender-based social structures and identities evolve?

It’s important to note that while these are interesting thought experiments, current AI is still far from achieving such capabilities and we have a long way to think through and regulate these possibilities as a society.

Chen Ya：To answer these questions we would have to go back into the history of human love and marriage. This would involve too many social, cultural and historical factors.

From a functional point of view, it seems that the union of a man and a woman is no longer necessary for human beings to survive and reproduce heirs.

In matrilineal societies, the female womb has an irreplaceable reproductive function, and men are generally physically superior to women. Men and women worked together to survive. This form of cooperation evolved into the family, and the relationship between men and women in the family, defined as marriage, became the cornerstone of social stability.

With the advancement of technology and society, gender is no longer a criterion for work ability, and gender discrimination in social work is on the decline. Same-sex marriages are recognised as legal in some countries and regions, and they can form a family together and have offspring through various means of assisted reproduction.

At the same time, although it is impossible to break through two biological sexes, there are more and more social genders.   According to statistics, there are currently 56 different genders in the world.

Gender identity is motivated by human psychological needs.   It is also about satisfying the psychological need to project feelings onto the other.   This ‘other’ can be the biological sex of the opposite sex or the same sex, can be a cat or a dog, can be a living plant or an inanimate virtual body.   It is an emotional attachment.

Relationships and marriages have the function of fulfilling human psychological, physical and social needs.  But can these functions not be fulfilled by technology?

Statistics show that in today’s society, more and more young people are reluctant to fall in love, and virtual lovers are just one emotional product that has emerged in response to this trend.  In 2018, a 35-year-old Japanese otaku married Hatsune Miku, a virtual idol singer from the second world.  After the wedding, he even lived with a Hatsune Miku doll.

Humans are hormone-regulated carbon-based organisms, and technology has advanced to the point where pharmaceutical and technological interventions can regulate human hormones and are beginning to enable human gene editing and modification. Silicon-based organisms, genetically modified humans and cyborgs …… will appear one after another.

With the development of brain-computer interface technology, if all humans in the future are fitted with brain-computer interfaces and humans and machines are fused, will superhumans be humans PLUS or will they belong to a new species of cyborgs?

Dolores from Westworld, who has been through several system reinstallations, always leaves a mark. When all kinds of human needs are no longer dependent on traditional models of provision, the family structure is no longer an option for most people. Gender diversity, human and mechanical, real and virtual will merge more and more, and all relationships and social patterns will have to be rebuilt. There is no such thing as a romantic or marital relationship in primitive societies, and the same may not be true of humans in the future. The future mechanical civilisation described by the British writer Aldous Huxley in his novel ‘Brave New World’ may be a prophecy of the future.

Marriage and family, regarded as the cornerstone of stable and orderly development of human society, technology will disrupt the traditional human family and marriage relationship, and also reshape the relationship between people, the existence of multiple relationships is inevitable. Of course, any change will not be accepted and adapted by all. Moreover, nature has never prioritised the survival of any single species. The dinosaurs became extinct after dominating the earth for 160 million years, and humans have only been on earth for only 200 thousand years. It is not up to humans to decide whether we survive or perish.

Edited by DeepL

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