Howard University President Ben Vinson Explores Artificial Intelligence in An Age After Reason, During Lecture at MIT

Photos courtesy Jake Belcher, MIT

After electricity was harnessed or the printing press was industrialized, what if they were restricted only to certain groups, classes, nationalities, or races of people? What would that have meant for human progress, and for the rights of all members of the human race to thrive? As artificial intelligence (AI) continues its march toward becoming a dominant technology integrated into virtually every aspect of human life, similar questions are being raised. Can humanity and AI coexist without irrevocably diminishing what it means to be human?

Howard University President Ben Vinson III, Ph.D., who has invested time and scholarship into examining this issue, delivered an illuminating lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of its Compton Lecture Series . His presentation was titled, “AI In an Age After Reason: A Discourse on Fundamental Human Questions.” Much of his discussion was framed around the fundamental questions that humanity needs to ask.

“I want you remember just how intimately connected our present, and even our future, is with our past, and previous so-called ‘ages,’ and some of the issues about humanity that emerged in them,” he said. 

Vinson opened his remarks by discussing how the human capacity to reason has been mitigated by societal constructs. He referenced time periods in history when science and the power of intellect were heralded as a liberating force and a way to demonstrate the progress of humanity. In many cases where something valuable is uncovered, some people saw intellect as the exclusive province of a small number of people. 

“The forces of our intellect were viewed as liberating us from older, primordial habits, worldviews, and thought processes that supposedly kneecapped human development,” said Vinson. “At the same time though, in the Age of Reason, the full power of intellect was hoarded by a select few. The true ability to reason was not believed to be available and achievable for all.”

That sentiment — that certain people were not physically capable of reason — served as the basis for any number of human-on-human atrocities. It enabled the powerful to put people into certain castes of second-, third-, and fourth-class personhood. If one’s mind wasn’t developed enough to reason, it was argued, then they weren’t fully human, and therefore didn’t have to be treated as one. Vinson posited that similar  risks of dehumanization exists with the rise of AI.

Reasoning over time has not just served to define what is human, and what it means to be human, but who could be fully human."

“Reasoning over time has not just served to define what is human, and what it means to be human, but who could be fully human,” Vinson continued. “In some ways this question still lingers, as cultures still jostle with differences of perceived intelligence that justify subordination, creating hierarchies of human life.”

Machine computing has historically been relegated to increasingly sophisticated execution of commands that have been directed by human beings, though many computing systems have been automated and have grown to a scale hard to fathom, except by technological geniuses. Nevertheless, no matter how complex, the computing systems have not been able to “think” for themselves and have existed to carry out the will of their programmers. AI, by contrast, is technology through which a computational system can mirror human intelligence and learn, make decisions, problem solve, and generate perspectives. Instead of performing tasks based on a set of instructions provided by humans, artificially intelligent machines can make decisions for themselves. Given the power, speed, and virtual omnipresence of computing networks, artificial intelligence has the power to transform the planet benevolently, while it simultaneously poses existential threats to our way of life. It isn’t a stretch to predict that the future will depend on how we collectively govern the evolution of AI. 

Given humanity’s struggle with the concept of basic human reasoning, Vinson questioned a future where yet a new stratum of perceived intelligence exists in the form of computational reasoning.

“If it reasons, are we moving towards an age after human reason?” questioned Vinson. “And what might that mean for the fundamentally human questions of our humanity?”

Vinson’s perspectives on the issue come in part from the multiple lenses through which he sees the past, present, and future as a scholar and a university president. He leads the historically Black college or university (HBCU) which is significantly focused on steering AI research and application. Howard is the institutional lead of the Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy (RITA) , the first University Affiliated Research Center funded by the U.S. Air Force. To support U.S. military missions, RITA is conducting research into autonomous technologies that function with minimal human supervision in complex and unpredictable environments in the air, in space, in cyberspace, on the ground, and in the sea. At the same time, the university has partnered with Open AI to use artificial intelligence in teaching, to enhance administrative effectiveness, and to upscale global access to the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center , “the largest and most comprehensive repository of books, documents, and ephemera on the Black experience.” Vincent argued that HBCUs are uniquely positioned to help ensure that AI serves humanity, not the other way around. 

“We have an obligation to ensure that AI is shaped by diverse voices, not by historical biases encoded into algorithms,” he said.