Artificial Intelligence and the Better Angels of Our Nature
A higher purpose for AI: making us the best versions of ourselves.
Despite humanity’s proclivity for innovation, we seem unable to sustainably improve in one area: connecting and maintaining strong bonds with others, individually and even more so as groups.
The phrase “better angels of our nature” comes from Abraham Lincoln1, and speaks of a lamentable distance between peoples and a hope for mutual understanding and acceptance. If transported to the present day, it’s difficult to imagine he would be impressed by the depth of connection and understanding in our current social climate.
Why can’t we understand each other? And can AI help?
The failings of the primitive mind
Evolution is how species adapt to changing landscapes—updating their operating systems (and components) to meet new external demands. It progresses glacially, over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. That poses a serious problem when external demands change dramatically over a short period of time, which is the case for humanity.
One way evolution does not work is called Lamarckism. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French scientist who posited organisms could evolve across a single lifespan to changing external pressures. A classic straw man argument involves giraffes: as low-hanging food becomes scarce, giraffes stretch their necks to reach high-hanging food, leading to a longer overall neck and begetting longer-necked offspring better able to survive (and thus reproduce) in a world with more high-hanging food than low-hanging food.
Although this type of “evolution” has been disproven, we remain stubbornly Lamarckian in our beliefs about humanity’s ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment:
A world where we can instantly and continuously broadcast our thoughts and image to millions.
Where sensationalism and extremism trigger our attention better than other stimuli.
Where our tribe—our close-knit community—is separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.
Where we compete for status not within our small tribe but with millions of other people.
Where body language and tone signals are received through a phone or computer screen.
Where writing and asynchronous collaboration are our primary communication and interaction forms.
Where our brain actively filters stimuli, focusing it as if we were navigating an ancient savannah, not a modern metropolis.
In short, we operate in a “soft” environment—i.e., mostly non-physical—that we are largely not evolved to inhabit. The same automatic brain responses that helped primitive humans survive now cause us to struggle to distinguish signal from noise in our modern world, often sending maladapted interpretations to our consciousness.
We call these (mal)adaptations cognitive biases, and part of the danger is that they are very good at convincing us that our interpretations are rational and infallible. Thus, it is of little surprise that we are at loggerheads, in personal interactions and at the societal level.
Using AI to combat the devils of our nature
Cognitive biases are hard to combat, even with utmost attention, reflection, and conscientiousness, and we suffer deeply from them. They lead us astray in decision-making, behaviors, and interactions with other human beings.
But what if AI could help? Imagine a personal, private AI buddy on your shoulder, helping you through this world you never evolved to navigate, and alerting you when your brain is playing these tricks.2 For example:
Availability Heuristic: “Jeff, you just told your wife she never makes morning coffee. That’s just not true. She’s made it about 50% of the time over the last six months, but only 10% over the last two weeks. You are overemphasizing the recent past.”
Commitment Bias: “Jeff, you continue to misstate the effects of cholesterol on heart health to your friends and family. Research has thoroughly disproved this point.”
Confirmation Bias: “Jeff, please restore the deleted data in the spreadsheet. You’ve dismissed it as an outlier, but it in fact is not. Although it contradicts your theory, it is accurate.”
Dunning-Kruger Effect: “Jeff, you just gave advice on marketing in that Board meeting. You do not have enough marketing experience. It is possible that you led the Board astray. Next time, avoid commenting on areas beyond your core expertise.”
Fundamental Attribution Error: “Jeff, you seem to be ignoring the difficulties inherent in this assignment and blaming your subordinate for the lack of progress. The reality is that the task you gave them is hard, not that they are underperforming.”
Resulting: “Jeff, that startup investment failed, but you still made the right decision based on the information you had. In any situation where uncertainty exists, outcome ≠ input quality. Keep focusing on input quality.”3
Self-Serving Bias: “Jeff, this accident is clearly your fault. Do not get angry and accusative. The road signs were clear; you just weren’t paying attention.”
Why it matters
If you had to describe a species with just a few words, you might say whales are “giant water creatures” and pandas are “lazy bamboo eaters.” Humans are “the tool species.” That’s what we do. We overcome challenges by inventing tools that allow us to inhabit our environments better than we otherwise should be able to.
We began by inventing tools to overcome physical challenges threatening our primitive survival (e.g., physical structures, spears, arrows, pottery). Next, we addressed challenges to our quality of life (e.g., clean water, sanitation, healthcare, transportation, power, energy).
Modern tools seem ever more focused on cosmetic improvements, often devoid of meaning. Undoubtedly, some will seek to shepherd the use cases for AI down that same path. But let’s not forget that there is an inner world—one that has challenged individuals, philosophers, and countless religious scholars for millennia—that presents the greatest challenge of them all: our ability to connect and understand each other (and the universe), brain tricks be damned, so that we might finally live true to the better angels of our nature.
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” - President Abraham Lincoln
You can learn more about any of these, along with many other cognitive biases, here. Or another entry point is through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, such as this book.