Artificial intelligence: Is it born from our love of being deceived?

What accounts for the current speed with which humankind seems to be planning its own self-destruction with its pursuit of AI technology? AI is only the latest version of human beings’ desire to enthusiastically invent and create devices and technologies that mimic human beings, only to replace them in the end. Human beings seem to be the only species that invents its own annihilation. What drives us to do so?

For centuries, humankind has been enthralled by gadgets and tools, be it mechanical tools or automatons, such as ETA Hoffman’s Olympia in the tale The Sandman that lures one into a world of make-believe where the human can no longer be differentiated from the non-human being. What begins with amusement and near orgiastic delight, as illustrated by Nathaniel’s dance with Olympia, ends up in an orgy of self-destruction, as Freud cogently describes in his text The Uncanny (1919).

Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage (1936/1949) can possibly help account for human beings’ passionate proclivity for seeking means of deception to aggrandize their own self-image. Since the mirror image does not reflect but constitutes the core of our human identity, leading us to identify with a false image that we mistake as our own, we seem to be compelled to strive with much jouissance to seek out doppelgängers that promise more complete versions of ourselves yet at the same time herald our eventual human demise.

Thrust into the drama of the mirror stage and driven by a sense of insufficiency, humankind is no longer craving for merely visual, but also for auditory and symbolic substitutions, as AI is busy designing every day. Has artificial intelligence, in its various formations, reached the position of Freud’s prosthetic god (1930, 92), or will human beings ultimately realize that they have once again been tricked into their own extinction by their invincible desire for omnipotence?

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is the past president, and supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), San Francisco. She is on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She was the 2008 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. She is a member and on the Board of the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse and works now as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film. She recently published her book on Édouard Manet, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past.