Every year millions of youngsters need to decide what to study at university. This is a very important and very difficult decision. You are under pressure from your parents, your friends and your teachers, who have different interests and opinions. You also have your own fears and fantasies to deal with. Your judgement is clouded and manipulated by Hollywood blockbusters, trashy novels, and sophisticated advertising campaigns. It is particularly difficult to make a wise decision because you do not really know what it takes to succeed in different professions, and you don’t necessarily have a realistic image of your own strengths and weaknesses. What does it take to succeed as a lawyer? How do I perform under pressure? Am I a good team-worker?
One student might start law school because she has an inaccurate image of her own skills, and an even more distorted view of what being a lawyer actually involves (you don’t get to give dramatic speeches and shout ‘Objection, Your Honour!’ all day). Meanwhile her friend decides to fulfil a childhood dream and study professional ballet dancing, even though she doesn’t have the necessary bone structure or discipline. Years later, both deeply regret their choices. In the future we could rely on Google to make such decisions for us. Google could tell me that I would be wasting my time in law school or in ballet school – but that I might make an excellent (and very happy) psychologist or plumber.15
Once AI makes better decisions than us about careers and perhaps even relationships, our concept of humanity and of life will have to change. Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. Liberal democracy and free-market capitalism see the individual as an autonomous agent constantly making choices about the world. Works of art – be they Shakespeare plays, Jane Austen novels, or tacky Hollywood comedies – usually revolve around the hero having to make some particularly crucial decision. To be or not to be? To listen to my wife and kill King Duncan, or listen to my conscience and spare him? To marry Mr Collins or Mr Darcy? Christian and Muslim theology similarly focus on the drama of decision-making, arguing that everlasting salvation or damnation depends on making the right choice.
What will happen to this view of life as we increasingly rely on AI to make decisions for us? At present we trust Netflix to recommend movies, and Google Maps to choose whether to turn right or left. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work, and who to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Democratic elections and free markets will make little sense. So would most religions and works of art. Imagine Anna Karenina taking out her smartphone and asking the Facebook algorithm whether she should stay married to Karenin or elope with the dashing Count Vronsky. Or imagine your favourite Shakespeare play with all the crucial decisions taken by the Google algorithm. Hamlet and Macbeth will have much more comfortable lives, but what kind of life will it be exactly? Do we have models for making sense of such a life?
As authority shifts from humans to algorithms, we may no longer see the world as the playground of autonomous individuals struggling to make the right choices. Instead, we might perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms, and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system – and then merge into it. Already today we are becoming tiny chips inside a giant data-processing system that nobody really understands. Every day I absorb countless data bits through emails, tweets and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, tweets and articles. I don’t really know where I fit into the great scheme of things, and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. I don’t have time to find out, because I am too busy answering all these emails.
The philosophical car
People might object that algorithms could never make important decisions for us, because important decisions usually involve an ethical dimension, and algorithms don’t understand ethics. Yet there is no reason to assume that algorithms won’t be able to outperform the average human even in ethics. Already today, as devices like smartphones and autonomous vehicles undertake decisions that used to be a human monopoly, they start to grapple with the same kind of ethical problems that have bedevilled humans for millennia.
For example, suppose two kids chasing a ball jump right in front of a self-driving car. Based on its lightning calculations, the algorithm driving the car concludes that the only way to avoid hitting the two kids is to swerve into the opposite lane, and risk colliding with an oncoming truck. The algorithm calculates that in such a case there is a 70 per cent chance that the owner of the car – who is fast asleep in the back seat – would be killed. What should the algorithm do?16
Philosophers have been arguing about such ‘trolley problems’ for millennia (they are called ‘trolley problems’ because the textbook examples in modern philosophical debates refer to a runaway trolley car racing down a railway track, rather than to a self-driving car).17 Up till now, these arguments have had embarrassingly little impact on actual behaviour, because in times of crisis humans all too often forget about their philosophical views and follow their emotions and gut instincts instead.