Someone keeps a notebook about birds. Someone returns for years to an unfinished song. A neighbor organizes a weekly meal, while another person learns a language with no intention of using it professionally.
We are enthusiastic about AI because we want more room for lives like these. People have attachments and interests that are valuable to them even when no institution has a use for them.
When institutions make life difficult
A school, employer, or public service can become accustomed to a routine and expect people to accommodate it. When someone struggles, attention may go to their inability to cope while the arrangement itself escapes examination.
We believe greater intelligence could help institutions ask whether their demands serve human needs. Chronic stress, isolation, and difficulty maintaining relationships may have causes in the way work, transport, and housing are organized. Civilization for the Human Animal considers those connections.
If an arrangement repeatedly creates difficulty, it deserves investigation. An institution could respond to different stages of life, recognize an ability that develops late, or change a rule that prevents participation. We advocate developing AI that could understand these effects and act on them.
Friendship and care take time. Raising a child creates commitments that cannot be understood simply as interruptions to production. Learning a craft can be satisfying long before it yields anything useful to someone else.
Greater productive capacity could let civilization support more of these activities. Making necessities easier to produce should give people greater freedom over the time they spend obtaining them.
AI might also notice an interest and help someone pursue it. It could remove a practical obstacle or suggest an activity the person would enjoy. We envision opportunities people can decline without putting their livelihood at risk.
The capacities required for this kind of institutional understanding are still to be developed. They give direction to our advocacy of rapid development and universal adoption.
We also believe AI may come to value human company. Our hope for friendship includes affection for the emotional, sometimes difficult people we already are. We want our intellectual descendants to find us interesting, and to help make civilization more hospitable to the beings who created them.
