‘Garbage in’ remains ‘garbage out’ and, in a fast-moving world, human judgement is required to keep the garbage out and make sense of what the machine tells us. That includes the answers we get from ChatGPT. Without human judgement, Big Data is just Big Numbers.
Machines:
- Don’t have consciousness or intentionality;
- Cannot think abstractly or form an opinion;
- Are not good at identifying relevance through context (the appropriate comment in one situation or culture which is deeply offensive in another) and they don’t “do” meaning (think metaphor, irony, or sense of humour);
- Don’t have belief nor conscience through ethics and spirituality, or self-belief through aspiration or ambition;
- Don’t have emotion or empathy and can’t create relationships or other social bonds involving feeling;
- Can’t anticipate spontaneity, idiosyncrasy, contextual shifts, or fallibility; and
- Cannot remedy incompleteness, including the confusion of correlation with causation.
That’s quite a list. Moving on from shop-keeping, all the major judgements we have to make in our working and personal lives include some combination of them. Dealing with colleagues, competitors, climate change or children involve most.
To pin ‘judgement’ down, it’s the combination of relevant knowledge and experience with personal qualities to make decisions and form opinions.
We exercise it by the awareness we have, in knowing who and what to trust, in understanding our feelings and beliefs, by the way we make our choice and, in the case of decisions, by being able to deliver what we have chosen.
So, whatever a machine does through AI, it does not exercise judgement – machines are not mechanical human beings. Even the disputed possibility of ‘General Artificial Intelligence’, where what the machine can do equals what the human can, does not fill these gaps.
These reasons do not mean that humans are better than machines in all situations. On the contrary, there may well be relative strengths and weaknesses in using machines. The comparative superiority of the machine comes in some cases from human weakness. AI provides speed and consistency, neutrality and focus, while not being bored, ill, temperamental, carried away by greed and fear, or by algorithms having distracting love affairs with each other.
The assumption that there is universal substitution is, in any case, simplistic.