ver the past two years, experts and pundits have focused on artificial intelligence’s capacities to store and formulate useful knowledge and to accelerate the production of various kinds of artifacts, from news stories and college essays to computer code, pictures, poems and screenplays. It’s exactly what one would expect from a society focused on consumption and productivity.
AI has already begun to change the world we live in. But the biggest change is yet to come. The machinery of AI belongs to a different order than the generations of increasingly sophisticated machines that have served to facilitate the mass production of marketable items. AI is not just a machine that can produce human-like “thought” with the capacity to learn more quickly and “deeply” than a human. All that is impressive, but on its own, AI will always fail to produce what is most important in our society and economy: human experience. Experience is a combination of four things: perception of context, conscious memory, emotion and muscular reflex. Its meaning comes from and depends on our ongoing interaction. It cannot be captured and formalized by AI.
We have two words for the co-creation of experience: dialogue and collaboration. In the previous installment of “Outside the Box,” ChatGTP brought to our attention the notion of “collaboratories,” which it defined as “spaces where humans and AI work together to solve complex societal issues—whether in business, science, ethics, or the arts. These spaces could be testbeds for how we co-create knowledge and values in practice.”