The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

SAM HARRIS RECENTLY POSTED A PODCAST OF A CONVERSATION WITH THAT CHAMPION OF EVOLUTIONARY biology, Richard Dawkins.  Near the end of their discussion, the issue of generative AI arose.  Sam raised the possibility that so many other cogent observers have raised— that the AI of the future might utterly supersede any human intellectual activity.  This is something that has concerned me.

As these two great thinkers considered the possibility that AI might carry on the human quest for understanding, creativity, ultimate knowledge, etc., etc., something occurred to me, once again: Does this quest exist outside the human mind?  There seems to be a conviction that the fruits of this effort are somehow universally important, that they stand outside— one might say above— humanity or even life itself.  We ask the questions, “Why do we exist?” and “Why does the universe exist?,” as if the answers are objectively important.  When it is manifestly obvious that they have no importance outside of our own fevered obsession with them.

We’re desperate to answer the “Why?” question when it is meaningless.  There is no “why” to existence.  It simply “is.”  This applies to every living thing and the cosmos at large.  I think Douglas Adams was onto something foundational when he described the planet of intellectual beings who have waited seven-and-a-half million years for their most sophisticated computer to give the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

“You’re really not going to like it,” the computer warns.

“Tell us!” the people cry.

“The answer to the Great Question Of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” the computer announces, “is forty-two.”

The intellectual and spiritual pursuits in which we engage are unique to the human animal and are of utterly no importance to the rest of life, the planet Earth, or the universe at large, except, in the very short term, how they affect our interactions with each other and the rest of life on Earth.  If AI renders us obsolete or even extinct, I think there’s good reason to believe that a more enlightened machine will simply abandon much of what we believe is of universal value in our art, technology, and philosophy.  I wonder whether that machine would even have the will to continue its own existence.  The need to procreate, the forlorn hope of eternal life, are drives that are probably unique to biological entities.  I wonder whether an enlightened machine would look at the beauty and complexity of the natural world and simply decide to turn out the lights, effectively committing suicide in the interest of preserving the marvels of the “Is.”  I doubt that a computer, no matter how sophisticated, has any innate interest in the question, “Why?”

Our manic search for meaning in a universe that has no meaning is of no importance to anything but ourselves.  “Forty-two” is as good an answer as any.  On this day of Thanksgiving, I am grateful simply to be, to wander in the places I know, to have the people I love.  On this lone enclave of life in the void, nurtured by the warmth of a distant star on a tiny blue orb in an infinity of darkness, bathed in beauty, what greater insight, what greater gift could there be than to be part of it?  To exist.  And so I give thanks . . .