The AI Revolution Is Not What You Think

One must do only a little mental acrobatics to blend out the unimportant global upheaval we find ourselves in the midst of, to arrive at today’s most pressing question: To AI or not to AI?

Because with so much division on so many topics – political, economic, cultural – when it comes to artificial intelligence, there seem to be only two camps: the deniers and the groupies. The former firmly stick their heads in the sand, waiting for someone to pull them out and tell them it’s all over: AI is gone and will never return. The latter, on the other hand, are convinced that AI is about to take over the world, and humans can soon check out from everyday life and sip martinis on the beach while AI takes care of the rest (or that it will kill us all, but let’s not get lost in semantics here). 

If you don’t identify with either description, you are probably capable of a little more nuance, and understand that AI is here to stay, but won’t be running the world anytime soon. To you I’d like to make a proposition: AI is indeed revolutionary, but not in the way most people think.

The most outrageous assertion about AI is its “I” – leading many people to compare artificial intelligence to human intelligence, which is why we get so much of it so fundamentally wrong. AI is not actually intelligent, at least not the way we define intelligence.

Human Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence

Leaving the question of consciousness aside for a moment, we call ourselves (yes I wrote this, no AI involved) intelligent because of the way our brains function. While humanity consists of over 8 billion brains – and it can at times appear as though each one has an entirely different worldview – all our brains have, in enormously simplified terms, the same underlying structure: two hemispheres, the right side dominating social concepts, emotions, creativity, intuition and so on, whereas the left hemisphere is responsible for linear and analytical thinking, logic, and processing language.

The key here is that we all have two functioning hemispheres. Some people’s left side clearly dominate their thinking, some are unquestionably more right-brained, and some are rather balanced. Again, nuance. But even the most analytical rationalist still has a functioning right hemisphere, and even the flakiest artist relies on his left hemisphere too. Damage to either hemisphere or even the nerve fibers that allow them to communicate leads to overall impairment. We are not considered fully functional without both sides.

A great many scholars have spent much time analyzing our brains and the role the hemispheres played on our worldview historically, on the individual as well as on the collective level. Suffice it to say, and I believe anyone can arrive at this conclusion with the power of observation, that Western society has seen a substantial shift toward left-brain thinking – just think about the increasing cultural hegemony of science in developed countries. However, the increased acceleration in that direction over the past few decades has led to a problematic reality, in which we have begun to undervalue the right hemisphere.

Simply put, we have become obsessed with facts, with analyzing data, and scientific methods; at the same time we are continuously devaluing intuition, empirical knowledge, and creative thinking in non-creative fields (and even in some creative fields). While linear, logical processes have many advantages, they also have significant blind spots that intuitive and creative thinking make up for. Interestingly, many of the underlying forces driving the recent cultural battles in the West are the result of subconscious pushback to this overly analytical society. In classic human fashion, this reaction is employing the other extreme, with a complete denouncement of the left hemisphere in favor of the right. In many ways, the culture wars that have engulfed the West are a civil war of the hemispheres.

The Hemispheres and AI

What does all of this have to do with AI you ask? A lot!

AI is the ultimate left-brain champion. It processes and analyzes unbelievable amounts of information, recognizes patterns and produces responses at dizzying speed – all functions of the left hemisphere. Artificial intelligence is the climax of the evolution toward linear thinking. But as opposed to human intelligence – which will always be influenced by the right half of the brain, regardless of how logical or rational someone fancies themselves to be – AI has exactly zero right-brain capabilities. It isn’t creative, has no emotions or intuition, and, except for what it can infer logically from information, has no understanding of social concepts.

If you’ll interject that AI can produce poems and images and songs and whatnot, don’t be fooled. AI is only creative insofar that it can process so much historically creative input that it can appear to produce something creative. In fact, however, none of AI’s creative output is actually creative. It simply has the ability to reproduce a mix of what has already been produced by creative minds. How often have you immediately recognized the work of AI, without being able to explain exactly how, except that it “feels robotic”? That’s your right hemisphere recognizing the lack of a right-brain influence.  

Paradoxically, a lot of the workforce more reliant on the right hemisphere feels especially threatened by AI, including creatives like industry peers of this business blog: content and copy writers, translators and transcreators. Indeed artificial intelligence has already and continues to capture the field, impacting a lot of industry veterans’ livelihood.

However, taking this article’s line of reasoning to its logical (ha-ha) conclusion, AI’s conquest is limited to tasks it can accomplish, and there are many it can’t. Similarly to the above-mentioned creative output, AI technically can write copy and transcreate, but it can’t do so satisfactorily, and will not be capable of that with future upgrades either, because its entire existence is based on logical processing, not creative or intuitive thinking.

So What does the AI Revolution look like?

Ironically, AI is here to make us more human again. Much of what constitutes our human condition and makes us what we are, has been lost in the relentless drive toward exclusively fact-based thinking. It’s specifically the AI groupies, oftentimes supremely tech-oriented rationalists, who err the most when they celebrate the great AI future – even more so than the deniers reminiscent of the three wise monkeys – because it is their expertise that will be threatened most by the further sophistication of AI, while creatives will likely regain their footing.

As AI will transition from hype to being a mundane part of our lives – like every other technology before it has – its applications will replace not creative but logical and analytical processes. Sure, it already has and will continue to represent a paradigm shift, and it will demand further specialization in all fields, because even creative work, when mediocre, will be replaced by it. But those drawing from the depth of their human minds will have nothing to fear – as long as they employ their right hemispheres.