Why technological development will not make us better persons
It was summer and I was eating a succulent Peruvian dish prepared by my mother. For the curious, the dish was “seco de cabrito". At that very moment, I heard the doorbell ring and it was a friend of mine whom I had not seen for several months. It was my friend, the scientist. We each shared with great enthusiasm what was new in our lives. As I tell him that I am pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy, I notice on his face an astonishment followed by the following words:
Friend: But what are you going to do with that, what use is that?
Me: Mmmm, let me explain it to you with an example: if I want to build a bridge, what kind of people would I need to build it?
Friend: Well, obviously you will need to have a group of engineers to study the territory and then the builders to execute the plan.
Me: Exactly, my dear friend. Engineers, architects, and builders know how to build a bridge. There is still a question, an ethical question: why should we build such a bridge?
Friend: Well, it will depend on the purpose.
Me: Let's say, by way of illustration, I want to build a bridge so that I can have access to a village and heal the sick. And another bridge to gain access to a foreign territory that I want to conquer.
Friend: But it wouldn't be right to build the second type of bridge.
Me: Why do you say that? Does your scientific knowledge of how to make bridges give you some special ability or some deeper insight into determining what kind of bridge would be correct to build? Does knowing more about bridges give you privileged access to knowledge about good and evil?
Friend: No, of course not.
Me: You have answered with great wisdom. You asked me earlier how useful my studies in philosophy were, and the answer is simple: while engineers study how to build bridges, philosophers study, among other things, whether building a bridge is a good or bad thing to do. That is to say, while engineers ask themselves about the technique of building bridges, we who aspire to be lovers of wisdom, dedicate ourselves to asking why we should or should not build those bridges. Everything that is scientifically possible is not always ethically viable. Knowing more about bridges is not going to help you answer the ethical question of whether or not the second type of bridge should be built. But studying and meditating on what justice and goodness are, will allow you to find the underlying reason why not building the second type of bridge is better than building it.
This conversation with my friend reveals one of the most important anthropological truths: We are all philosophers. Whether we are better or worse philosophers is another matter. But we are all philosophers because existence itself forces us to interpret our place in the world. To do this, we ask ourselves evaluative questions of the type “why is option A better or worse than option B?". Neither scientific knowledge nor artificial intelligence can answer these questions. They can provide us with more data that we may have missed so we can consider them in our analysis, but they cannot provide us with moral reasons for our existence.
Take another question: why is it better to build bridges that do not fall down? Because it is ethically or evaluatively assumed that life is better than death. This kind of answer, as you can see, does not come as a result of knowing more about engineering. In a similar way, artificial intelligence and technological development can only amplify the fullness or emptiness that already exists in our moral and spiritual lives, but cannot give us any answers to our existential questions. To find answers of this kind, we will always need to go to the moral question, the value question, the metaphysical question, the spiritual question.
