The Cultural Search: AI, Sustainability, and the Human Touch

The increasing growth in diversity and complexity of forms of life, accelerated by newmedia and the development of AI, raises fundamental questions about howbest to sustain educational systems that serve democratic forms of life. Alan Turing predicted the need for a “cultural search” “involving the human community as a whole”, something not reducible to the evolution of algorithmic or biological processes alone. On his view education involves the development over the human life course of both “discipline” and “initiative” and the inheritance of “culture”. It is these, including human “phraseology”, that he felt wouldmost fatefully shape, sustain, transform, and translate intergenerational, intersocial, and intercultural values and symbolic forms over time. On Turing’s view, “intelligence” is an “emotional” concept rooted in “common sense”, consisting in the appreciation of the manifold differences among different types of search. It is primarily constituted neither by the ability to mimic human activities, nor to optimize rational choices or achieve consensus about the outcomes of only one kind of search. This paper argues that Turing’s idea of “the cultural search” 1) illuminates the global, specifically human educational challenges to democratic forms of life in a world of AI, including the limits of algorithms to master ethical and social problems of the public and 2) draws out the importance of what Rawls, analyzing the philosophical foundations of democratic liberalism, called the sense of justice and the problemof democratic stability. Both are centrally involved in the possibility of sustaining democratic forms of life over time. Given the variety of diverse “comprehensive doctrines” by which people live, as well as the differences among particular situations of democratic forms of government around the world, educationmust foster the development in citizens of a “sense of justice” sufficient to sustain an “overlapping consensus” on the positive good of principles of tolerance and difference over time. The result is 3) that AI design for democratic education should constantly attend to the centrality and the plasticity, connectivity and resilience of human-to-human interactions in the presence of machines tomeet the challenge of an evolving matrix of democratic values, emotions, aspirations, and human capacities that alone make it possible for democratic societies to be sustained and developed.