Artificial intelligence must not be allowed to replace the imperfection of human empathy

By Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Professor in Global Thought and Comparative Philosophies, SOAS, University of London

At the heart of the development of AI appears to be a search for perfection. And it could be just as dangerous to humanity as the one that came from philosophical and pseudoscientific ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries and led to the horrors of colonialism, world war and the Holocaust. Instead of a human ruling “master race”, we could end up with a machine one.

If this seems extreme, consider the anti-human perfectionism that is already central to the labour market. Here, AI technology is the next step in the premise of maximum productivity that replaced individual craftmanship…

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