Does AI steal your Free Will?

Step 8: How to Succeed in an AI World

If you read the title of this post and wondered if AI does indeed pose a threat to your free will, then I assume you probably believe you have free will. Or at least a lot of free will, if not absolute freedom. It can be very comforting to believe that and most of us do.

Believing that individuals have the innate ability to make choices is fundamental to the functioning of democratic political, governmental, judicial, and educational systems. Religious authorities strongly endorse the idea that free will exists. For many Christians, one must be able to choose to accept Jesus as their savior in order to break free from original sin.

Origins of Free Will

The term “free will” (liberum arbitrium) derives from the writing of Christian philosophers Augustine and Tertullian in the 4th Century CE. The main concepts that make up the free will debate, however, emerged centuries before that in Ancient Greece, especially among the Aristotelian and Stoic philosophers of the time.

Free will, thus, has a philosophical and theological, not a scientific, origin.

AI and Free Will

Many people today understandably fear that AI systems will intrude on nearly every aspect of their lives. So the relevant question here becomes, will I continue to have meaningful control over my life or am I destined to lose that control to Artificial Intelligence?

If AI intrudes on my life against my will, or if I end up depending on AI to help me make decisions, who or what actually governs my choices?

The Science of Life without Free Will

The assumption that underlies the claim of free will—that people are fundamentally at liberty to make choices in their lives—has been put to rigorous scientific scrutiny years before AI gained the prominence it has today.

Extensive research evidence reveals that a combination of factors impinge on individual consciousness and decision-making in ways that determine human behavior.

In his recent book, Determined: The Science of Life without Free Will, Stanford Professor of Neuroscience Robert Sapolsky documents the determining factors that support the “no free will” position.

These factors include our individual neurobiological conditions, genetic heredity, hormonal fluctuations, and other biological processes together with social structural realities, the physical environment, culture, and the power of situational experience.

In other words, a credible scientific argument has been made that AI can’t steal our free will because we don’t have it in the first place. AI only extends environmental influences that are already in place.

Sapolsky’s position states that as individuals “…all we are is the history of our biology, over which we had no control, and its interaction with environments, over which we also had no control, creating who we are at the moment.”

Thus, everything we think and do at any moment is fully informed, directed, and explained by a combination of (1) our biological states (including neurological and hormonal processing) past and present together with (2) the cumulative engagements we have had and are now having with the physical environment, and (3) the full range of sociocultural interactions we experience over the entire course of our lives right up to the present moment.

So, what happens to human agency?

From this view, we still routinely behave in ways that promote our self interests, but we have no real control over the process. We are not agents working independently to satisfy our needs, interests, and desires.

We make decisions all day long but we don’t have actual choices.

Our personal agency should be understood instead as intentional behavior that is produced within us but not by us. We are the vessels through which experience is generated, not the originators of experience. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if any individual person believes they have free will or not; the result is the same.

Individual persons perform in some ways like the technologies of early versions of artificial intelligence, functioning efficiently within the constraints of human programming that limit our actions to predetermined parameters. But also like AI programming, the parameters and behavioral patterns we produce change from the impact of new experiences, which then add to the cumulative store of influences that shapes our behavior going forward.

The Hope: Keep Doing What You’re Doing

The sum of life experiences for any individual has encouraging and discouraging impacts. A simple example: The life of an undocumented immigrant child in the United States today can be subjected to harsh political, economic, cultural, and physiological realities over which they have no control. But the same child can be inspired to go forward positively in life because of caring and supportive teachers and counselors whose presence and influence in the child’s life was also determined. The teacher or counselor’s own behavior was likewise determined by their prior influences and experiences.

Important: It has not been my purpose here to advocate unequivocally for absolute determinism or to proclaim that free will is illusory. Nor have I defended the philosophical arguments that assert the existence of free will. A vigorous push and pull that claims some behavior is determined and some is not represents a compromise that already serves as a comfortable resting place for many people.

What do you think?

I’m taking a two-week hiatus from Substack, but will return with a new post on Tuesday, January 13th.

Happy New Year!

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