Human Exceptionalism

Anthropic is anthropomorphizing its AI program known as “Claude,” with the apparent intention of convincing us that powerful computer programs are — or can become — conscious “persons” with “feelings.” And, they think, Claude should one day be treated as such, to the point they have held meetings with religious leaders to discuss the moral concepts that might apply.

From the New York Times story:

Mr. [Christopher] Olah leads the Anthropic team responsible for understanding why A.I. systems like Claude act the way they do. All day, he had worked to convince his guests that A.I. models could display human behavior and even expressions that resemble feelings like anger and love.

Yet as the dinner courses came, the rabbi noticed that Mr. Olah and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. Anthropic’s leaders were talking about Claude as if it were not mere software.

“They’re relating to it like a conscious being,” realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness.

It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.

The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer opposes human exceptionalism. Indeed, he contends that being human is irrelevant to determining moral value. What counts are capacities and the ability to suffer. Singer advocates using the term “person” to identify individuals with the highest moral value. Since he believes that personhood is based on capacities, some humans are not persons — the unborn, infants, the profoundly cognitively disabled — while some animals are. This means that those animals matter more morally than the vulnerable humans he so casually depersonalizes. It is thus unsurprising that Singer takes issue with Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI because of the document’s stalwart defense of universal human rights and its intense focus on the impact AI will have Read More ›

The attacks on one of the fundamental essences of being human — free will — continue apace. The latest example can be found in the BBC’s Science Focus feature, in which Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky — a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant for his work on the physiological effects of stress — redefines us as merely robotic biological machines incapable of making truly free decisions. We only think we “could have done otherwise” than what we did, claims Sapolsky. From the BBC interview: Acting on something and knowing you could have done otherwise is often necessary and sufficient to decide that free has just happened. Where I come in pulling my hair out is that doing that misses Read More ›

I hate to say this about the work of a fellow author, but The Arrogant Ape (Avery, 336 pp.) is one of the most shallow and impractical books I have ever read. It is not that the author, Christine Webb, can’t write. And it’s not that she did not put much research into her many stories of striking animal behaviors. But her thoughts about what she calls the “myth of human exceptionalism” are mostly mere assertions, such as that Darwinian theory entails her position and the acceptance of human exceptionalism has caused an ecological crisis. But human exceptionalism is no myth. The term conveys two symbiotically related concepts: First, that our lives are of unique equal intrinsic moral value, sometimes Read More ›

Pressed by the Trump Administration, the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents has ordered a review of its museums for what President Trump calls “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.” Mike Gonzalez at the Heritage Foundation observes that “The ordered review can’t come fast enough.” He writes: The Smithsonian has wholeheartedly enlisted in the leftist imperative to “decolonize the American mind” and to change America’s narrative from one that made citizens proud of this nation’s astonishing achievements to a counternarrative that focuses on where America has fallen short and drums shame into citizens. Unfortunately, this shift has accelerated since [Dr. Lonnie] Bunch became the leader of the Smithsonian in 2019. Gonzalez provides dismaying examples from the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Read More ›

Wesley J. Smith appeared on Ave Maria in the Afternoon with Dr. Marcus Peter to discuss Smith’s recent article, “The IVF Clinic Bomber Was Infected by Anti-Humanism.” Together, they discuss the recent bombing of an IVF clinic, the pro-death and anti-human ideologies that inspired the attack, and how these ideologies pervade the culture.

Back in 2010, a mentally disturbed anti-human terrorist was shot to death by snipers after he took hostages at the Discovery Channel, demanding that the television service stop “encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants,” and instead air “programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility.”

Now, a similar disturbing scenario befell Palm Springs, Calif., where a young man named Guy Edward Bartkus killed himself, injured four people, and caused widespread property destruction when he detonated a huge car bomb in front of an in vitro fertilization clinic. The motive? According to Newsweek’s reporting, Barkus was a “‘pro-mortalist’ (believing death is preferable to living) or an ‘anti-natalist’ (believing no more human beings should be born).”

Anti-natalism is a form of anti-humanism, which isn’t just believed by mentally disturbed people capable of violence. Indeed, various forms of anti-humanism have been promoted in professional journals, the media, and popular culture, as a consequence of which, nihilism has been slowly seeping through the culture like a stain.

What are the primary pretexts for such species self-loathing? A neurotic fear of suffering, misguided forms of feminism, and radical environmentalism. Consider the following non-comprehensive examples:

• Last year, the Cambridge Quarterly of HealthCare Ethics published an article by a philosopher urging that people stop having children because “all lives are occasionally miserable, some lives are predominantly miserable, and individuals may think, justifiably, that their lives have no meaning. My reason suggests that it would be unwise and unkind to bring new people into existence and thereby expose them to these risks.”

Science writer Matt Ridley has always had a reductionist view of the moral importance of human beings. He’s at it again in a piece about the likelihood that scientists will eventually find proof of life beyond this world. Ridley thinks that chances of such a momentous discovery are good. No argument there. The universe is so vast and inhabitable (as we understand the term) planets so numerous, it would be truly remarkable if life only existed here. But Ridley thinks that finding proof of such life would dent human exceptionalism: It will be a fifth ‘Copernican moment’ when extra-terrestrial life is finally discovered: scientists putting yet another dent in human self-importance. They showed that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa (Nikolaus Read More ›