Why?

My reasons to write about AI, the meaning crisis, and my transformation

This essay is a contemplation to understand why I started this blog. If you want to quickly know why it deserves your attention, I urge you to delve into the about statement.

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“I do not know anything that does not interest me.”

(Gianni Vattimo: After the Death of God; talking about Heidegger)

I am sitting in my garden, transfixed by the endless stream of white-tailed jets whizzing across the deep blue summer sky that blankets the burgeoning Parisian suburbs. I’ve just finished a video from a philosopher which struck me in multiple ways and left me feeling a mix of guilt and pleasure. Guilt for procrastinating in watching this video instead of doing what I set out to do this morning, and pleasure in the unexplainable synchronicity of how Ellie Anderson, the philosopher-podcaster, put in words precisely how I am feeling. Is this the working of the universe, or just YouTube’s clever AI recommendation algorithm?

The intensity of this final push is palpable. She speaks of Sartre's existentialism. A cup has an essence that precedes its existence: we design it for holding water, shaping it to fit our hands so we can drink from it. I, on the other hand, have an existence that precedes my essence. I have the agency to shape who I will become. 

I am autopoietic, a beautiful word I am in love with: I create myself. 

Not arbitrarily, not divorced from reality or from my own history, but with a great degree of freedom.

I have been preparing for this moment, when I would finally open up about the transformation I am undergoing. I feel a simultaneous focusing of me and the universe, as if all of creation has been preparing for this. When looking back, this will likely seem linear and simple; boring even. I have been there. Boredom usually kicks in when my creation is detached from me, when I cannot really say why I worked on a problem after the problem is solved. That is a trap I want to avoid this time by digging deep within myself, staying connected to why I am doing this even as the how overtakes me with its exciting potential.

So why am I launching this blog? 

I clench my jaw, painfully willing my feelings away. But I can't, my excitement of being true to myself and my shame of baring my soul are too much. With a quiver in my voice, I look away and finally manage to utter the words:

“I want to do it, so I feel that I exist.”

I must share and connect, not only with you, my reader, but also with myself. My partner gently reminds me that I am the one who said it in couples therapy, not her or the therapist. But it's so hard. Detachment is a drug. My drug. I became addicted to it in my youth and have made a career out of using it. I have built impenetrable walls around my emotional core, leaving only one gate open, leading to the engineered, the lifeless, whose complex structures I adore so much.

The world reinforces detachment, and as an AI researcher, I am praised for creating complex structures with no human emotion attached to them. It is a trap and a gift at the same time.

The thrill of working on problems I enjoy is an intoxicating gift. And I do enjoy it: even while I am writing this, I have one eye on some AI experiment I am running, eagerly awaiting the answer to the technical question I posed. But I now feel that it is not enough. The impact of what I create is limited to a small circle of people I have no real connection to. As accolades pile up and the likes and citations increase, my craving for true validation grows stronger. I must witness first hand the transformation I bring to people, so my own transformation can be made real.

The improbable success of AI and the rewards I receive also create a cruel trap: they lock me, the AI researcher, in the world of things. Meaning is served to me on a silver platter, and suddenly everyone seems to be interested in my esoteric research. But I know they don't really understand the complexities of my work, which makes dinner conversations all the more awkward. Simultaneous to the feeling of being trapped, self-transformation towards my emotional core makes me anxious and exposed. The dual forces of external pull and internal resistance make the move towards my authenticity steeper than any mountain I have ever climbed.

Contemplating on the top of Mount Ida, at the beginning of the journey in 2017

So why am I determined to enter the depths of my soul and follow my innermost desires? Why not just simply do what is expected of me and devote my life to the external structures, my shiny objects, I so admire?

It is because, I feel, both the external world and my internal well-being requires such a move. And this counter-acting motivating force has gradually become stronger than the drag of the status quo.

This is a radical approach; I must treat AI as if it were an AI researcher. To create a fully integrated, value-facing AI, we need AI researchers who are aware of their goals and motivations, who are in touch with their bodies and the world, and whose aims are in tune with their core beliefs.

In essence:

to effectively integrate AI into society requires the integration of the scientist into their scientific world.

This integration has a triple purpose:

1. to make myself whole,

2. to gather insight about how to bring meaning into AI, and

3. to connect.

I hope that by connecting with my inner core, what I write will echo with you as well, awakening something in you that's been sleeping until now. I know I can offer you something that you don't already know - something precious - about AI, self-transformation, and life in general. It may surprise you that I did not always know this, that my typical pattern was to have an original thought, thrill at it, then insert it into my existing knowledge and just assume others must know this too. What I'm doing right now with this blog is breaking free from this cycle. In doing so, I'm very much hoping that I'm also able to offer you a hand in facing similar challenges like the ones I went through.

Method: the first-person stance

I break with the conventional third-person scientist-observer stance, which keeps me at arms length from my subject. To stay closely aligned with my subject, I will be constantly asking myself two questions that reverberate in my mind:

1. “Where are you standing?” (Jonathan Pageau)

2. “What does it mean to you?” (my partner)

The first question asks about my perspective, putting me, the observer, at the very heart of the action of knowing. No longer am I separate from what I observe.

This is a bold move. The first person point of view of the world is fraught with traps of self-deception and illusion. It is also unconventional, running contrary to the accepted standard of scientific objectivity. Yet is inescapable. By failing to make this move, science forgoes all understanding of phenomena like consciousness, self-transformation, and artificial intelligence. By failing to make this move, I am left in a dichotomy; the propositional world of factual but valueless science, and a value-laden participatory world of emotion, relationship, and life in general. To reconcile the two sides, I must answer the second question.

I will ask about the value of my topic and about my passion for the question, bringing my subject to life. I will write not only about the subject but also my relationship to it. About the reason of my interest.

This serves my integration, but it is also a crucial epistemological gesture: it brings to light the implicit subjectivity of science, whose source is the unavoidable subjectivity of my interest.

I will launch a series of commentaries, each focused on content that interest me and authors that I feel the connected to. I am summoning the courage to start online conversations that are not only about what you know, but why you find a certain topic captivating and your personal journey to get there.

I will be writing about my feelings and my body, for this is the only path that can lead me to a sense of wholeness. I realized that even spirituality, often considered to be solely mental, can be most effectively achieved via physicality. An example: when I'm asked those two questions above, I get angry. My hands shake as I wildly gesticulate, passion overtaking my being and severing all connection with my partner. “But, my love, what does this have to do with you?” she interjects, pulling me from my reverie. My inner child recoils in indignation: “I have just discovered and explained the most beautiful structure of the world, why are you asking why it is interesting to me?” But she is right; to understand myself, I need to answer that question. I must push through the anger to uncover what lies beneath and make this more than just another shiny object that quickly loses its luster.

Conclusion

After endless plodding and attempts, I'm launching this post despite its imperfections. To mark this beginning, I'll bring up a quote from Gianni Vattimo's After The Death of God, which started me on my journey five years ago. I used it to open my talks about the value dilemma we encountered at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science, a topic explored in one of my debut posts. It was Heidegger who famously postulated the impossibility of objective science:

“The concept of interpretation is all here: there is no experience of truth that is not interpretative. I do not know anything that does not interest me. If it does interest me, it is evident that I do not look at it in a noninterested way.”

My heart overflows with gratitude for your presence here today. I am humbly requesting your kindness and insight, for you to be my writing counterpart. Your words have the power to shape my blog, and together we can create something wonderful. I ask you to join me in this journey, and please subscribe to be part of the process!