THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: QUO VADIS?

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding the phenomenon of artificial intelligence and its role in the development of highly developed information societies, their scientific, educational and other systems, and humanity as a whole. Artificial intelligence is considered as a new technology that has emerged in response to the global challenges of the digital age and has an extremely large potential to influence all aspects of human life. Attention is drawn to the fact that there is currently no unambiguous opinion of the academic community on the nature and functionality of artificial intelligence, and the opinions of experts are mainly polarized around two positions: 1) it is a meta-tool created by humanity that will lead humanity onto the path of evolution through the flowering of collective intelligence; 2) it is a rather dangerous tool that poses a hidden threat and is capable of causing the involutional development of humanity, directing it onto the path of selfish economy of mental effort, intellectual deactivation, and cognitive simplification.

It is shown that the strategy of turning to artificial intelligence is of great importance in humanity's choice of an evolutionary or involutionary path of its development: a binary strategy of selfish use as a «tool for oneself» or a strategy of self-development through appeal to the collective mind. These strategies are based on two basic explanatory paradigms – binary («consciousness – matter») and trinitarian, or the paradigm of self-development («consciousness – carrier of consciousness – matter»).

It is argued that the binary paradigm fails to adequately assess the place of artificial intelligence in the evolution of man and human cognition, reducing the analysis to a technocratic agenda and anthropomorphization of digital technologies. Instead, an alternative approach is proposed in the paradigm of self-development, where artificial intelligence is proposed to be considered as a unique technological opportunity for the creation of alternative models of consciousness, which in the times of the modern technological revolution can become an answer to the global information challenge and the risk of cognitive collapse. Within the self-development paradigm, the carrier of artificial intelligence is not a technical system, but a joint product of a team of developers, who are attributed with the signs of subjectivity and intelligence, since this product provides an opportunity to solve intellectual problems of the highest level of complexity. As for the subjectivity attributed to artificial intelligence, in the opinion of the authors of the article it is nothing more than a reflection of the user's own subjectivity, or «mirror subjectivity».

Thus, artificial intelligence is understood not as independent of the subject, such as is exclusively a product of high technology, but as a product of the collective activity of developers and users and a catalyst for further joint intellectual activity. Unlike the binary methodology, where natural and artificial intelligence are in opposition to each other, in the methodology of self-development, the main ones are the individual and collective subjects of knowledge, which interact in the technological space of artificial intelligence, which gives grounds to speak of the coevolution of collective intelligence and technology in the name of the evolution of humanity on humanistic principles.