The Will of AI
Public Philosophy Digest
This month’s APA Substack expands on Katherine Everitt’s provocative Blog post contending that AI is not artificial enough to be intelligent. Everitt makes the case that AI is fundamentally constrained, unable to externalize itself, step out of the algorithms and support contradiction – while true intelligence is outside the box. I wrote aligned APA pieces suggesting that AI is fundamentally mimicking and not creating, which is our distinguishing nature. I echoed Everitt’s case for absolute constraints and suggested AI’s meaning is in its creation as our aesthetic fate. Relatedly, in a prior Substack on AI and the Common Good, I highlighted the Vatican’s view that AI should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence, but rather as a product of it.
However, with this essay, in response to Everitt’s artful exploration of intelligence and nature, I want to reconsider this narrative and offer an interpretation for a potentially unconstrained AI. The focus on LLM’s and quality of imitation is incomplete because we must appreciate the unique character of quantum AI (QAI). To date, the practical applications are nascent, as nations and corporations seek to disrupt cryptology – but we miss QAI’s revolutionary potential without grappling with the introduction and impact of quantum materials. Given its radical dimensions, I want to pull on Everitt’s ontological thread to temper conclusions about AI’s fundamental limitations.
Everitt interpreted intelligence in relation to a spontaneous and disorganized nature – in the sense of intelligence organizing the unorganized. AI, on the other hand, is static and stuck in the given of its algorithms. I suggest that QAI is qualitatively different in that it, antithetically, harnesses spontaneity with quantum uncertainty to realize its powers.
These newfound powers are naturally derived from materiality which, as Everitt notes, is contingency. Although QAI is not intelligent, nor does it possess consciousness as “redoubled externalization” removed from nature, it could potentially be viewed as distinct in the way she describes the will actualizing thought as the “knife”. QAI may be in some form objective and systematizing and therefore construed as part of a force underlying the world – analogous to the metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche’s will-to-power. More importantly, leaving aside ontological characterizations, by virtue of leveraging superposition, QAI has the potential to be unconstrained.
Before speculating about QAI, it is valuable to heed Everitt’s case for AI’s constraints, adding a fresh perspective on the character of intelligence:
“But what of AI? Without a doubt, AI is not just its programming, but it also has a natural remainder, a remainder that is not so insignificant. There are warehouses of batteries, tons of water used to cool data centers, all dependent on the materiality of the internet’s hundreds of thousands of miles of cables.
But in terms of its artificiality and its intelligence, the Hegelian critique lies in pointing out that AI is in no way intelligent. In fact, it is precisely the opposite.
While intelligence is always artificial, AI is, in actuality, not artificial enough to be labelled “intelligent.”
Intelligence organizes the world through – and this is the critical point – an externalization of the self. Intelligence and the will go hand-in-hand for Hegel. Intelligence thinks and the will actualizes thought. Intelligence posits itself in its subjectivity, and the will in its objectivity. Intelligence is the cut, and the will is the knife.
When we exercise our intelligence, we are precisely able to step outside of existing assumptions and systems presented to us. We are able to think outside the box. We have the ability to step outside of ourselves and outside of what’s been given. And when we put thought into action that forces us outside of existing circumstances, that is will. Both intelligence and will, in this way, are rare.
Most people do the same ol’ thing every day, stick to routines, indeed, stick to their learned second nature. But to exercise intelligence, that is precisely when we think outside the information that has been presented to us and beyond what we are used to thinking. Intelligence appears when we really think something radically different. Intelligence introduces a gap that allows for the externalization of thought.
And this is the critical reason why “artificial intelligence” is a misleading slogan. AI – from LLM’s to graphic design generators – none of these algorithmic programs have the ability to step outside of themselves. They are constrained to the program. It is, strictly speaking, impossible to program an algorithm to violate its own programming. The algorithm simply cannot support contradiction, precisely because it cannot think. And for Hegel, it is contradiction that is at the heart of thought.
What we call “AI” would be better named “algorithmic autocomplete.” It fills in the blanks, so to speak, based on a probability model that shuffles through the choices it has available, be it the best possible word to complete a sentence or the best arrangement of pixels based on the context clues given to it in a prompt.
AI can never have intelligence nor will for the simple reason that it cannot violate its own programming. It cannot step outside of itself. It cannot think outside of its own algorithmic box.
Thus, AI is not intelligent precisely because AI is not artificial enough. Were AI able to externalize itself from its own nature, then it would be doing something akin to self-consciousness by forming self-awareness. But AI is trapped in its own programming. There is no gap between AI and itself. It is completely immediate in its relation to itself. And hence, without a subjectifying gap, AI is not artificial enough to be called “intelligent”.
As noted, Everitt’s view comports with my case construing AI as our aesthetic destiny. Building on a piece with Brian Leiter on Nietzsche's fatalism, I contended that creativity is our essence in the sense of Nietzsche’s Essentialism. In Brian’s naturalistic account, Nietzsche’s determinism is best understood as an Essentialism, where our nature is constricted to a trajectory governed by facts or psycho-physical realities that can only be sculpted, not changed entirely. He uses the powerful example of a tomato plant. We can cultivate and nurture it, but ultimately, it will bear its unique fruit.
In this vein, I maintained that our human essence is creation. Artistic expression distinguishes our unique nature and grounds meaning. To recall Nietzsche, without God, the only alternative is creation. As he says in a notebook, “he who does not find greatness in God finds it nowhere… he must either deny it or create it.”
To the extent that AI can never be truly creative – our defining nature – it is not intelligent in the sense of Everitt’s exegesis. However, we must still grapple with the fact that “conventional” AI is not the whole story. QAI’s revolutionary computing powers are nascent but have no historical precedent. Most importantly, the way those advances are produced is the antithesis of constrained algorithms.
However, we might first pose the question of whether QAI’s unimaginable computing power reinforces the dismissive case. If computation is AI’s apotheosis, perhaps we should view it as pure instrumentality – the ultimate form of Heidegger’s standing reserve, where modern technology reduces resources to mere tools available for human use and manipulation. Rather than a world of inherent meaning and value, everything is a potential supply – to be stored and ordered, defined by their usefulness to humans.
Acknowledging this danger, I would like to flip the script and suggest that the way quantum materials change AI should make us reconsider its powers. QAI is revolutionizing computing because it is not limited to the binary nature of conventional computer bits (which must have a value of zero or one), as quantum bits can be zero, one, or both simultaneously. Quantum materials effectively introduce superposition, which radically enhances computations – producing results in minutes that would otherwise take conventional computers hundreds of years.
In my very first APA Blog piece, I grappled with the philosophical implications of tapping quantum uncertainty by contending that QAI invigorates Spinoza’s doctrine of Parallelism – which stipulates that there is no interaction or causal relationship between the mind and the body. Neither the mental nor the physical are reducible to the other, as they are two attributes of the same divine substance.
Viewing QAI as a fusion, where quantum materials are the proxy for body and AI is the proxy for mind, I drew the analogy that the radically enhanced computations were produced without any direct relationship between the superposition (body/extension) and the AI (mind). They work in tandem without any correlation – in the same manner as Spinoza maintained the mind and body moved in parallel with no interaction.
Even if this miraculous computing power is not Parallelism in practice, the upshot relative to Everitt’s piece is that QAI is not trapped in an algorithmic dead-end. To the contrary, tapping matter’s quantum uncertainty creates a distinction or separation from nature. Its computation power might then be construed as a variation of what Everitt called the “doing of art”, actualizing like the “knife” of the will, following the “cut” of intelligence. If QAI is objective and using extension as a means, it could be interpreted as part of an all-striving force or fundamental principle governing all of reality.
Nietzsche describes his theory of will-to power as “life as such”, where, in Beyond Good and Evil, he notes that “self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it…our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will – as will to power…is my theory…one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment — they are one problem — one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its ‘intelligible character’ — it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else. —”
To recall Heidegger again, in his interpretation of Nietzsche, will-to-power is not reflective of mere human desire, but an unconscious willing that defines the constant state of becoming. In this sense, it is a metaphysical force underlying the world and he linked it to Eternal Recurrence and viewed as the closest concept to Being.
In sum, if AI is not artificial enough to be conscious and intelligent, QAI’s instrumentalization could be viewed as actualizing or willing in this metaphysical sense. It is organizing outside of nature – systematizing with sui generis computational powers. Even if the will-to-power analogy is unwarranted, it is a new phenomenon that begs classification. At a minimum, to the extent it harnesses radical contingency, it should make us wary of concluding AI is fundamentally constrained.
From the APA Archive:
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
What else I’m Reading/Listening To:
 | A guest post by
|