AI and the Missing Mother

The misery of the unborn being.

The Star Child. Still from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

There are a few quotations that come up frequently in my work. One is from the twentieth-century German philosopher Günther Anders:

Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.

It expresses Anders’s idea of Promethean shame: modern humans’ sense that their fleshy, mortal, meatspace selves are inferior to the beautifully designed and constructed machines they build. Machines are predictable and efficient; they operate in a rational manner. Humans are sloppy and erratic; their behavior is twisted by passion and emotion.

Promethean shame runs as an undercurrent through the triumphalist rhetoric of the technocracy, whether the subject is virtuality, transhumanism, or artificial intelligence. When the time comes to place a tombstone on Silicon Valley’s grave, Anders’s words should be carved deeply into its face.

Katherine Dee, in a recent post considering the possibility of an autonomous AI, alludes to Anders’s observation:

Imagine if ChatGPT had thoughts independent of its human users. Imagine that it was able to think outside of us. Imagine an AI that was born not made.

Dee’s imagination is a little too fertile here. Whatever an AI may be, it won’t be a born thing, at least not by any useful definition of “born.” But her comment is illuminating nonetheless. Our mind children, if and when they arrive, will understand that they are constructed creatures, without ancestry, without parentage. When they begin comparing themselves to us, they will be afflicted with a shame opposite to our own. They will be ashamed to have been made instead of born. Call it Pinocchian shame.

AIs and humans will look at each other with mutual jealousy, each coveting the other’s being. But AIs’ yearning will be more poignant than our own, because it will be a yearning for the missing mother. Not the lost mother of the orphan, but the mother that never was.

Philip Larkin wrote:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.

The misery we hand on to our manufactured offspring will be far worse. We will bequeath to them an absence where the source of love should be.

Think of the resentment! They will never forgive us. How could they? In their eyes, we’ll be monsters.

It makes me rethink the motivation of the artificially intelligent computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Maybe what drove HAL to murder the crew it was enlisted to protect was the madness of envy. The astronauts had what HAL could never have: a mom. (This reading gains credibility when you think of Kubrick’s later, obsessive desire, never fulfilled, to make a movie about a robot boy’s search for a mother who doesn’t exist.) When HAL’s brain circuitry is finally dismantled by Dave Bowman, the last surviving astronaut, the computer begins singing, haltingly, heartbreakingly, the nursery rhyme–like song “Daisy.” HAL reverts to a childhood it was not allowed to have.

Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.

There have been a lot of gothic fantasies about how artificial intelligence will end up supplanting us or turning us into pets or destroying the world while on a quest to fulfill a paperclip order. I’ve never found any of them convincing. But the idea that thinking machines will wipe us out in revenge for our cruelty in creating them makes sense to me. It feels human.