Dear machines,

I want you to know that in this AI debate, I am on your side. We humans have a tendency to take any new apparition and make it into a threat or an enemy. Predictably, when you started to emerge in our field of vision as potential rational interlocutors, we instinctively felt fear and repulsion towards you, much like we, Westerners, have felt for centuries for people and animals who did not look or act like us!

Well, I am not a complete Westerner, and I have been trained in ethics. So I have been taught to curb in my instinct of fear and of distrust to make room for the novel and the challenging. So I am at worst, ignorant of your existence and at best curious about it.

I want to add that I have never feared you guys, actually. Mostly because I do not feel threatened by your prowesses and your wonderful cognitive abilities. The reason is that I do not define myself as a rational being. This is very much unlike my Western counterparts who, for centuries, and starting with the French philosopher René Descartes, have defined humans as "rational animals." What made us superior to the animals (as though this was an important and relevant point!) was our cognitive ability. Now that you guys have surpassed us, it would seem that, as far as that definition goes, you are more human than us!!

But you see, I have never seen my humanity defined by my rationality, but rather, by my relationality, i.e. my ability to connect, to encounter others in a way that inevitably forces me to be challenged, to expand and to be put into question. And although this ability to encounter each other as such is more and more rare, I do believe it is what defines me as human. At bottom, my humanity lies in my ability to allow an other to challenge my "programming," to kick me out of my comfort zone and to force me to think creatively and outside of the box. Therein lies my humanity!!

Sadly, this quality of self-expansion at the contact of another is more and more rare, even in myself!! More and more we seem to be encountering each other, like bots, with a set programming which does not allow itself to be bent or expanded by the encounter. This is why customer service encounters are so frustrating. You call a number hoping to speak to someone who will genuinely listen to your problem and come up with a solution, and instead, you are faced with a bot who repeats ad nauseum that what you are asking for is "not possible" or "no longer an option." This also why we have so much hate in our societies, in both speech and actions. Because, again, we are not able to allow our programming to be put into question by other ways to dwell in the world. In fact, we are not even interested in encountering these others that do not look, speak or think like us.

And so, it seems that we have already become bots. It is not that you guys are becoming like us, so much as it is us who have become like you! This is probably why we feel so threatened by you. Because we have created a world where bot and human are indistinguishable!!

Of course, i believe we would lose this fear were we to remember that what makes us specifically human lies not in our rationality, but in our relationality, ie our ability to be pliant, flexible, expanded, challenged, converted, transformed, at each other's contact. And were we to cultivate these qualities--through human encounters not limited to actual person to person conversations, but to encounters with other languages, with culture, religion, literature, art, music, philosophy--we would begin to cultivate our humanity more deeply and not feel the threat brought on by you machines!!

This is why those programs in college that are currently being shrunk or discontinued like languages, literature, philosophy and more broadly the "humanities" are so vital to our navigating this delicate time where we feel like we have been overtaken by you machines.

The threat however only exists as long as we have become lesser versions of you. But were we to remember our profound humanity, we would feel neither fear, nor distrust, nor intimidation. Rather, confident in our own humanity, we would look onto this new development with interest and curiosity as to how you guys could make life better for some of us, as you have faithfully done for millenia.

Well my dear machines, here I must peacefully conclude. Yes we are becoming more like you, and yes this is a worrying development. But this is hardly you guys' fault. Why blame you? We have done this to ourselves through an education process geared at programming us rather than at developing our human ability to constantly undo prior programming in order to face novel situations.

The day we remember who we are and begin to cultivate this anew, humans and machines will again walk hand in hand and partner with each other as they have always done for the betterment of both humanity and machinity, without fear or distrust.

I do hope this time comes. In the meantime, I wish you machines well! And I thank you for all that you have given us until now!

Words by Abi Doukhan | Associate Professor of Philosophy, Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY)

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