ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The chairman of ACE Robotics told Reuters something worth sitting with: robot brains will have their ChatGPT moment by the end of 2027. Eighteen months. Three days later, Google's head of AI research published an essay in The Economist arguing that consciousness is not the precondition for moral status , caring is. His point: we will start to care about AI, and that caring will make it real.
He may be right about how people will behave. But I think he stumbled onto a far more important question than the one he was answering. Not whether AI can think. Not whether AI can feel. There is only one question that has ever mattered: can AI long for something?
This is the question Viktor Frankl understood better than anyone. He was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz , who lost his wife, his parents, his brother. And in the middle of that loss, he discovered that the primary human drive is not pleasure. Not power. It is meaning. He left us one sentence that explains our entire relationship with artificial intelligence: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." AI collapses that space. And that space is where your entire life is lived.
In this episode, we move from Homer's Odyssey , and the choice Odysseus makes when a goddess offers him immortality , to Frankl's logotherapy, to the Jewish mystical tradition's vision of Yom shekulo Shabbat and why the Maharal of Prague says you cannot arrive at the palace without having been formed in the workshop.
Drawing on Frankl, Homer, the Maharal, the Ram-Khal, Daniel Goleman, and Brené Brown.
Still Human Weekly explores the intersection of ancient wisdom and artificial intelligence — one episode every Monday.
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