By Teagan Revelle, Newswire Intern 

The Department of Philosophy sponsored an event last Thursday with about 25 attendees, and Insomnia Cookies, to discuss the future of the relationship between humankind and Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

Panelists Dr. Gabriel Gottileb of the Philosophy department and Dr. Nathan Somner of the Computer Science department posed the question, “Will AI Kill Us All?” 

Somner mentioned that making sure AI stays aligned with goals set by humans, and that the regulation of AI is important if we want to remain in control of AI. 

“You might spend 10-15 years, maybe a lifetime working on a set of problems or a problem that you’re like, inching closer to solving and now AI can do it. And so that kind of zaps the purpose that those people have set for themselves,” Somner said. 

“So, now it’s like, ‘I’m the guy who’s gonna solve the proof.’ Well no. Now you’re the guy who is gonna check AI’s work and you’re gonna use a program that is really doing all the work to make sure its checking the work right, and now you’re just a bureaucratic mathematician,” Somner said. 

Somner went on to connect this to Xavier students, as he mentioned that it is the same thing as using AI to do their assignments. 

“To me that’s already happening at Xavier on a much smaller scale. Because students are doing that, not with mathematical problems but with their papers. It’s the same thing. So, you wanna achieve something, and you wanna be the person that achieves it, and there’s no real value except for your grade which I guess some people care about-but there’s no real value…if you’re not doing it, if you’re not achieving it,” Somner said. 

AI works as a database of human knowledge, though some people believe it to be doing more than just synthetic puzzle solving work as it evolves over time.  

AI uses tokens to predict what comes next, and it reads massive amounts of text and other data to learn and make patterns. The result feels like reasoning, but is all pattern matching.  

“I think searching for meaning is one of the big things that does make us human and is one thing that sets us apart from AI that does not have any intrinsic meaning until there’s a prompt, until there’s some setup that triggers and its like, ‘Oh now I have meaning and now I can do something’ whereas we get bored and we search for meaning and different people find different meanings in their lives and somehow we all coexist,” Gottileb said. 

Gottileb further mentioned that he doesn’t think we can instill this type of humanity into AI the same way that humans have it. 

“It potentially has the capacity to develop mathematics to a level at which we no longer are capable of understanding it. That is-no particular human could potentially get its mind around what the mathematical proof is doing. And that’s where this question comes up for me – it is like, we just might not be as intelligent as we think we are,” Gottileb said.