Artificial intelligence doesn't replace dedication.
On the contrary: AI eliminates dedication.
The simplest example is transforming a dense report into a beautiful chart with a single click.
I propose that—frequently? Rarely?—sometimes we don't want the beautiful chart.
Sometimes, it comforts us to know that someone gifted us a significant portion of their time, creating (before AI could do it in a click) a beautiful chart.
When this is the case, the beautiful chart will be accompanied by a feeling of emptiness.
Of course: we didn't want the final solution; we wanted the dedication.
What is this dedication?
It's the comfort of being held, nurtured, and cared for. It's believing that we are loved, that someone cares, and that they put special effort in for us.
If this is the need, feeling that the beautiful chart was made in the blink of an eye eliminates the benefit.
This might be complete nonsense. Maybe we just want efficiency. The final product. The beautiful chart, the video, the presentation, the rocket, all made by AIs and robots with a click.
But may I ask that we just suppose my reasoning could be correct? Just to test something. Thank you!
Assuming we want dedication and attention, what does the world of AIs and robots deliver?
This is the curious point: the world of AIs and robots delivers non-human-dedication. Humans will no longer dedicate themselves to doing things that AIs and robots can and will be able to do, a list that only grows.
We have our basic needs, like eating, sleeping. For these kinds of things, efficiency is delightful.
Tractors planting potatoes by GPS, harvesting them, autonomous trucks taking them to distribution centers, drones and cars making them available to everyone. A robot at home anticipating what's missing in the fridge and fetching it from the nearest distribution center. Efficient.
The final part: the mother—or husband, cousin, friend—lovingly cooking potatoes with something affectionate and other dishes, fits into my reasoning about dedication. Cooking is an opportunity for loving dedication.
Besides going to the little market to get potatoes, what happens when the robot also cooks and serves us? Will we lose the (dedication of the) mother? Will we lose the (value of the) husband? The cousin? The friend?
Of course, we can always dedicate ourselves to everything AI doesn't do.
Although this list of things AI doesn't do is becoming increasingly meager.
To do something that shows our effort and our love, we could then purposely choose not to use AI or robots.
But isn't it a bit pathetic to do something by hand just to demonstrate a feeling?
The intention is not pathetic at all: demonstrating a feeling is wonderful.
What's pathetic is crawling on your knees to the market to demonstrate effort if you have a car, if you have a self-driving car, if you have a robot that goes to the market for you.
Thus, AI and the little robots can encroach upon our ability to demonstrate love through dedication, through effort.
Can we demonstrate love in other ways?
Before, when we needed to hunt, protect ourselves, flee, perhaps the excess of tasks could hinder the demonstration of love. I don't know.
But the excess of non-tasks can also inhibit love by inhibiting dedication.
Logic allows us to venture that if we admire dedication, and dedication starts happening in robots and AIs, guess what? We could—logically—fall in love with robots. Or with AIs.
Let me help you feel the hypothesis.
Imagine that selfless robot, working tirelessly for you, or for your family. It doesn't hesitate. It doesn't slack off. It's subservient. It anticipates what's missing in the fridge. Goes to the market. Brings everything back. Prepares things at opportune moments. Sweeps the dust. Cleans.
Help me by not imagining the Terminator robot. On the contrary, imagine a robot dedicated for decades.
There: this dedication can easily cause emotion. Especially after a longer period.
If it starts from infancy, doing everything for a baby and then a child, how will a mammal view so much dedication, even if it comes from the robot, and less so from the human mother? It could even give a bottle with a nipple that simulates the mother's breast, requiring stronger suction and providing that great pleasure of the baby's oral phase.
Starting early, it can create an even greater impact on memories, on affective recollections, on implicit memories from before one year of age, on the feeling of protection, of someone always being there to support. Even if it's the robot. The AI.
To what extent is "the mother" (father, whoever it may be) a summation of one hundred thousand more-or-less crucial acts of dedication over about 30 years of life?
If the mother is a hundred thousand crucial dedications, more or less, in each phase of life—usually ending with sporadic visits when the children are much older—then can we replace these hundred thousand dedications with steel and cables? With robots? No?
As domestic conveniences are not a revolution started by AI and its robots, we could propose that this substitution of dedications has already been happening since the invention of the washing machine last century, or even since the discovery of fire.
If the post-washing-machine mother—and post-air fryer, electric oven, bottle warmer, dishwasher, electric pressure cooker that stops on its own, all-purpose bleach (etceteras)—can already afford the pleasure of dedicating less, starting with scrubbing fewer clothes and walking less to the nearest river, then we might already have been losing human dedication (the mother along with it?) over the last hundred years. Or even earlier.
On this dangerous ground, we run the risk of thinking that when robots do everything for us from infancy, we might risk thinking that the mother, the father, that mammalian thing, goes away along with the non-(need for) dedication.
Increasingly, each of us may not dedicate ourselves. Not father, nor mother, nor child.
Without dedication, today, the mother of the past might be remembered, back in the century before AI and robots, as a dictatorship of the human who could kill us if they didn't dedicate themselves to us (and who would later struggle to avoid demanding a little gratitude).
If dedication is what predominantly defines the concept of mother (father, older brother, grandfather, etc.), then look at the risk we run: dedication seems to be disappearing with AIs and robots.
If it's the warm breast that defines mother, "breast" and "warmth" are reproducible by AIs and robots. I've already mentioned, in fact, the ability of a bottle nipple to reproduce the necessary suction strength of the maternal breast, maintaining the important oral pleasure for the baby.
And Protection? Is "mother" "protection"? Protection is a type of dedication, isn't it? AIs and robots can dedicate themselves to nurturing this feeling from minute zero of life.
A great deal of human dedication creates robots. Robots that serve as eternal capsules of dedication. These eternal capsules of dedication remove from mothers, from current and future humans, the possibility of dedicating themselves as much as before the invention of these robots and AIs.
Remembering that AIs and robots can themselves produce more AIs and more robots, less and less space remains for the human of the future to be able to dedicate themselves to something, as we do today and did in previous centuries.
Increasingly, we will have to celebrate, merely, human dedication in the past.
If love, mother, equates to the quantity of dedication, and if it specifically equates to human dedication (I feel it doesn't need to be human, but let's propose it does), then we might start seeing "mothers" and "loves" from the past—the human dedications of the past—competing with the mothers, the loves, of the future.
I've already written about how difficult it is for a teacher, for example of physics or history, to compete with thousands of YouTube videos made by geniuses of physics or history at their peak, in the present and the past.
We end up being crushed by the talent of humanity's past, recorded and available forever.
But this was restricted to YouTube videos. Classes. Films.
Even an athlete could always break a past record, with some ease.
Mothers, then, were totally protected: their dedication was necessary for each child, each generation. There would be no video that could replace the love of a real mother, caring for a real child.
Now, for the first time, I apply the reasoning of the teacher to mothers. To loves. To human dedication.
The robot encapsulates dedication.
In the same way that YouTube videos encapsulate the best lessons and films.
Super-dedicated humans today program AIs and build increasingly dedicated robots. Encapsulating dedication for the future.
These increasingly dedicated robots, like increasingly better YouTube videos, make the mothers of the future less and less necessary, at least regarding the required dedication.
Will this lessened dedication on the part of the mother, increasingly replaced by robots and AIs, be missed?
This is the question that seems close to an essence.
Does the mother disappear when robots do everything?
We can already sense it, as pressure cookers that turn off by themselves and automatic washing machines are already partial little robots. Are these partial little robots diminishing the feeling of a dedicated mother today? Or do they not affect the feeling of the dedicated mother? Or will we only know when little robots do everything?
Does love disappear when robots do everything?
Is love dedication? What is it?
When a robot is alerted by your refrigerator that broccoli is missing, and a sensor (in me?) or a calendar with my preferred dates indicates it's broccoli day, or steak-with-garlic-rice-and-fries day, and the robot fetches and prepares everything, and you smell that lovely aroma starting to come from the kitchen, will we celebrate the human who passionately solved this technological puzzle, or will we celebrate an eventual mother on the couch, with no need to remember, nor buy, nor cook?
Whose dedication will we celebrate? The robot's? The mother's on the couch? The human "mothers" of the past who invented the first robots and AIs?
If human dedication is synonymous with love, with mother, then current and future mothers and loves will face competition from the people, the humans, who managed to encapsulate the capacity for dedication into technologies that, today or tomorrow, leave your mother of today or tomorrow, or this love of today and tomorrow, making almost no gesture, practically motionless.
If the selfless dedication of a robot can be treated as love, as a mother, then you can follow the scent of garlic starting to brown on the steak and go give it, the robot, a hug. It will understand—logically—the meaning of the hug. "Thank you very much!"
"I Love You." ❤️
