Humans, AI and the dividing line between them
What distinguishes human beings
In parallel with constantly learning more about AI, I’m reflecting on my learning from an interview and a Masterclass offered through Mind in Mind by Allan Schore, psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology, entitled ‘Right Brain, Affect Regulation and the Emotional Self). Part of what distinguishes us as human beings from other living beings (and indeed from AI) is our capacity to not only to reflect (a cognitive process), but also to be reflexive (using our cognitive, emotional and somatic capabilities), as well as our capacity and our profound need to relate to, to connect with, and to be seen, acknowledged and understood by other human beings with compassion.
Building blocks of human behaviour
In psychologist Harry Harlow’s surrogate mother experiment, Harlow ‘took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth. The infants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother did not; in the second, the cloth mother had the food while the wire mother had none.
In both conditions, Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate.
Harlow’s studies inform the scientific understanding of the fundamental building blocks of human behaviour.’
For more information on what underpins our very existence, we need only turn to the ‘still face experiment’. ‘In this experiment an infant is exposed to a severe relational stressor: The mother maintains eye contact with the infant, but she suddenly totally inhibits all vocalization and suspends all emotionally-expressive facial expressions and gestures. According to Tronick (2004), the infant’s confusion and fearfulness at the break in connection is accompanied by the subjective response, “this is threatening.” This stress response is then followed by bodily collapse, loss of postural control, withdrawal, gaze aversion, sad facial expression, and self-comforting behaviour.’ The infant’s response externalises their inner experience and conveys vividly the distress of the loss of connection. The same distress will occur in adults, but may be manifested differently.
Relationship
In executive coaching, sustainable change occurs primarily because of the client’s relationship with the coach, a relationship which enables trust, psychological safety, connection, reciprocity, and care. In leadership, the same phenomena – enabled in a healthy relationship between leader and led – nurture productivity, creativity, innovation, retention, and competitivity.
Emotionality
As Schore sets out there is a central role for the recognition of emotions, the expression of spontaneous and intense emotions, and the nonverbal communication of emotions in human survival itself. Our emotionality enables our ability to rapidly respond to danger and other urgent problems. It processes environmental challenge, stress and pain and manages self-protective responses such as avoidance and escape.
AI, AI, AI
In recent weeks I’ve been the recipient of what has felt like an exponentially-expanding torrent of messages, announcements, broadcasts and news about AI (not least of which is the view that the human race may be extinct in 10 years, and news of the attack by OpenAI agents on the Hugging Face platform, on which the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications).
AI and relationship
It feels to me that there’s a danger of investing in AI the belief that it can do and be everything, including relating, offering warmth and nurturing.
A relationship with another human being is fundamentally different from what one could possibly call a relationship with an AI. A human, particularly an experienced coach, will notice the flicker of a smile, a momentary furrow in the brow, a sigh, a stiffening of posture. They will enquire with curiosity into the client’s experience in that moment and will (unlike AI – at the moment, at least) join the client in exploring the meaning of that experience. They will notice in relationship with the client – being curious about how things are happening in the way they are, and about the wide implications of the systemic and relational factors at play. They will call on their own emotional and somatic experience in the moment to help inform them about what might be happening for the client.
An AI may notice or observe these changes, but it will not have anything resembling a lived, experienced or embodied understanding.
Most importantly, an AI couldn’t be attuned to a human being, and it couldn’t relate to a client’s inner experience, or join the client in a joint exploration to make meaning together. An AI wouldn’t feel any emotion in or without the presence of another, as a human would. Neither can it experience or demonstrate vulnerability.
What now?
Amidst all the excitement about AI and its exponential growth in capability, it feels important to be vigilant: to question what it gives us, to remember that it is not human (the clue is in the label ‘artificial’), and to remember that our everyday interactions with human beings are actually life-giving and help ensure our survival.
Photo by notorious v1ruS on Unsplash
